It has been estimated that as much as 50 percent of tropical timber still comes from illegal sources. In response, international efforts to combat the illegal timber trade have intensified…
n the eve of the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, indigenous leaders and human rights advocates spoke out today to highlight the rising violence against indigenous people…
n a decree published this April, the Brazilian government of President Dilma Rousseff awarded a large area of land to the last remnants of the Arara Indians whose cultural and…
s night falls on the Areia Homestead Project, forty kilometers from the town of Trairão, in the western portion of Pará state, the silence is cut short by the roar…
Several members of an illegal logging gang in Peru were reportedly arrested last Friday in Ucuyali, an inland region located in the Amazon rainforest. According to reports, a joint action…
efore leaving Altamira, I spent an afternoon with Raquel Rodrigues Santos, one of two botanists going on the trip into the remote heart of the Amazon basin. We bought massive…
The lower Las Piedras River, in the far west Amazon rainforests of the Madre de Dios region of southern Peru, is an incredibly biodiverse area — but it’s also the…
Innovation in Tropical Forest Conservation: Q&A with Dr. Phillip Fearnside Pasture meets gallery forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. How much is a forest really worth?…
Flying over the endless forest of the West Amazon, while searching for short-eared dogs. From so high up it was possible to see just how much forest there really is,…
Months after closing sawmills on the fringes of an indigenous reserve for the hugely-imperiled Awá people, the Brazil government has now moved into the reserve itself to evict illegal settlers…
Brazil has launched a military campaign to evict illegal loggers working from the fringes of an indigenous reserve home to the Awá people, reports Survival International. Inhabiting the Amazon rainforest…
The 2013 Zoos and Aquariums: Committing to Conservation (ZACC) conference runs from July 8th—July 12th in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by the Blank Park Zoo. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com…
A new video by Alianza Arkana includes an Earth Day message from the indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon who are facing the existential threats of logging and fossil fuel…
River and forest abuts vast soy field in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Illegal loggers beware: trees will soon be calling—literally—for backup. The Brazilian government has begun…
An interview with Karimeh Moukaddem, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Typical farmhouse outside of Parauapebas. Photo by: Karimeh Moukaddem. The city of Parauapebas, Brazil is…
View Larger Map Evidence of indigenous people living in "voluntary isolation" in a remote part of the Amazon has been found where an Italian Catholic priest is campaigning for Peru’s…
Logging in Gabon, Central Africa. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Industrial logging in primary tropical forests that is both sustainable and profitable is impossible, argues a new study in Bioscience,…
José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva speaking at a TEDx Amazon in 2010, just a few months before he and his wife were assassinated for their activism. On May 24th, 2011,…
Illegal charcoal kilns in the municipality of Tucuruí. Photo by: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace. According to a new report by Greenpeace, top U.S. car companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Nissan…
Sawmill in Indonesia. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Last year researchers took the first ever publicly-released video of an African golden cat (Profelis aurata) in a Gabon rainforest. This beautiful,…
The past ten years have seen unprecedented progress in fighting deforestation in the Amazon. Indigenous rights, payments for ecosystem services, government enforcement, satellite imagery, and a spirit of cooperation amongst…
Logged wood off the Ucayali River in Peru. Photo by Toby Smith/EIA. The next time you buy wood, you may want to make sure it's not from Peru. According to…
Forest fire in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. The combined impacts of deforestation and climate change will bring a host of new troubles for the world's tropical…
Map, Bahuaja Sonene National Park, Grasshopper Mimicking a Wasp. Photo by: David Johnston. Research and exploration in the Neotropics are extraordinary, life-changing experiences. In the past two decades, a new…
A brown-spider monkey in Selva de Florencia National Park. Photo courtesy of WCS. Researchers with The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Colombia’s National Parks Unit have located at least two…
An investigation by Brazil's Federal Police has detailed a significant trade of illegally logged rainforest wood by Peruvian nationals making its way from northern Brazil to the U.S. and Mexico,…
José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva speaking at TEDx Amazon in 2010 José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva, were gunned down last night…
Despite the worst drought on record in the region, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during September fell by 20 percent relative to September 2009, reports Imazon, a research institute that…
An interview with Doug Gunzelmann. Like all commercial roads through rainforests, the 5,300 kilometer long Rodovia Transamazonica (in English, the Trans-Amazonia), brought two things: people and environmental destruction. Opening once-remote…
A new study in Biological Conservation has shown that edge forests and forest patches are more vulnerable to burning because they are drier than intact forests. Using eight years of…
