This coming weekend, nature lovers from cities around the globe will have a chance to test their species identification skills in a global competition. The third-annual City Nature Challenge takes place April…
When Colleen Kamoroff and her graduate advisor Caren Goldberg collected water samples to look for the DNA of non-native fish species, they could not have guessed the potential importance of…
An unlikely group of experts have teamed up to apply software developed to find distant stars to help solve problems in conservation ecology. The “astro-ecology” project at Liverpool Johns Moores…
Sharks are in trouble worldwide, with one study estimating that people kill up to 100 million of them each year through illegal fishing, shark finning, and bycatch. The negative public…
Hundreds of students from science and technology programs around the city of Los Angeles, California have begun participating in a hands-on effort to apply ingenuity and technology to protect the…
Satellite imagery has transformed how we assess changes in forest cover. The standard optical sensors carried by Earth-orbiting satellites capture the energy from sunlight reflected off objects on the Earth’s…
The arduous task of assessing animal populations in the wild takes plenty of sweat and tears. Now a group of scientists is adding blood to that mix, in an innovative…
Researchers have identified a genetic analysis technique that pinpoints the harvest location of trees—a breakthrough that could help officials detect illegally traded timber. The multi-national research team tested the potential…
Tens of thousands of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon have been fighting decades of contamination of their natural resources by foreign and domestic oil companies. Oil spills, leaky pipelines,…
What if we had a public library for scientific data? The proliferation of sensors monitoring the Earth—from space to planes, drones, vehicles, park rangers, camera traps, and even animal tracking…
Jarrod Hodgson is one of very few scientists who have used rubber ducks as part of their Ph.D. research. Hodgson and colleagues at the University of Adelaide compared the accuracy…
The United States, a major ivory market The sale of ivory across international boundaries has been banned since 1990, when the African elephant was listed among species prohibited for commercial…
Keeping equipment running in harsh field conditions can challenge any tech project, as can working successfully with volunteers. Some projects have to manage both. A recent Wildtech post describes wpsWatch,…
Is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef losing its male sea turtles? A new study has found that green sea turtle hatchlings in one of the world’s largest colonies are increasingly female,…
Imagine you needed to map the spread of an invasive plant species in a tropical forest. Hyperspectral imaging and LiDAR are great at identifying vegetation, but have their limitations and…
For the last two years, a U.S. non-profit and local partners in South Africa have quietly been catching wildlife poachers using remote cameras connected to a unique cross-continent volunteer monitoring…
The Brazilian Amazon lost 184 km2 of forest in December 2017, according to the country’s Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon (Imazon). The data, obtained exclusively by…
Technology is changing how we investigate and protect planet Earth. The increased portability and reduced cost of data collection and synthesis tools, for instance — from visual and acoustic sensors…
Where deforestation is widespread, sometimes it’s hard to see the (loss of) forest for the (loss of) trees. Global Forest Watch’s online forest change monitoring platform has added a new…
Do you know where your endangered species are? A new online tool offers access to and analyses of a wealth of documents and data related to the United States Endangered…
When times are tough for elephants, knocking over a tree may be the best way to get at the food resources it offers. Trees with bees, however, may avoid damage…
Each year, trafficking in wildlife parts earns international crime syndicates some $8 billion to $10 billion. A portable DNA analysis tool can now rapidly identify the species of plant and animal samples found on suspected smugglers.
Ecologists on Santa Cruz island off California had a big problem with small creatures. Argentine ants, an invasive species that disturb native bees, ants, and other insects critical to the…
Technology above the clouds is helping scientists study sharks beneath the waves. A new initiative combines shark movement data with publicly available vessel identification data—both transmitted to researchers via satellite—to…
A satellite-based alert system can now detect fine-scale deforestation in near-real time, enabling managers or rangers in tropical forests to respond to early stages of deforestation. Anyone can now register…
A pair of drones and the efforts of nearly 3,000 volunteers have helped scientists carry out a detailed study of the trees within a 400-hectare (1,000-acre) patch of the Amazon,…
A conservation technology team at WWF-UK has produced a series of best-practice guidelines for three key data collection techniques—camera trapping, passive acoustic monitoring, and remote sensing through Light Detection and…
Can technology drive conservation? That was the question Mongabay founder Rhett Butler recently posed to a panel of three specialists on the frontlines of applying technology to conserve key species…
A recent study mapped the world’s dry forests using a relatively new tool that combines creative satellite image analysis with local- and national-scale knowledge. Natural resource agencies worldwide inventory their…
Increasingly well-funded poaching gangs, as well as the pressure of ever-growing surrounding human populations, have made protecting wildlife and nature reserves a sometimes dangerous and uncertain way to make a…