Biodiversity Hotspots News

Tropical insects are wildly diverse, but most species are unstudied or unknown, even as they’re heavily impacted by deforestation, climate change and pesticides.

Recent surveys hint at an insect apocalypse. But are insects at risk globally? Mongabay talks with 24 scientists on 6 continents to find out in an exclusive new series.

The way humans have changed the forests of Central and South America may be making it impossible for subsistence hunters to continue their way of life, according to two conservation…

It’s hard to imagine how the oceans might operate without the sway of human activity. The recent assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found…

Just before Pope Francis released Laudato Si’, an encyclical, or formal letter from the pope, on the environment, on May 24, 2015, global concern for the environment seemed to be…

Fines and the threat of disease could dissuade consumers from buying bushmeat, according to recent surveys of markets where wildlife species are sold for food in the Southeast Asian country…

Warmer temperatures are fanning the spread of a deadly disease in frogs, a new study has found. Teasing apart the complex dynamics of the effects of climate change on how…

It might seem harmless enough at first. The big eyes and the rambunctious, bounding play of the tiny cats and monkeys on your social media feed draw you in, and…

Life on this planet, in all its wide diversity, is disappearing more quickly now than it has at any time in human history, and some 1 million species of plants…

For more than three months, penguins living off the coast of Namibia have been battling an outbreak of bird flu. The worst of the disease seems to have passed, but…

The elephant poaching epidemic continues to tear across the African continent. It’s even reached remote refuges in recent years, like the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, where poaching deaths began surging…

Scientists have fretted over the expanding masses of plastic in the ocean for decades. Most have seen the rise with their own eyes, and yet the available datasets typically don’t…

Countries should concentrate on outcomes instead of actions when they set aside areas for parks and reserves to shore up the loss of biodiversity, according to a group of scientists.…

Island-dwelling animals around the globe often face a common threat: alien species that compete with them for food, kill them and their young, and otherwise hamper their ability to survive.…

As part of a wave of rural violence sweeping Amazonia, dam activist Dilma Ferreira Silva, her husband and a friend were brutally murdered last Friday; a large scale landowner is in custody.

The chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sabah has called on construction crews working on the multi-billion-dollar Pan Borneo Highway project to avoid breaking up the region’s forests and…

The dourada, one of the Amazon’s goliath catfish species, plus other commercially valuable migratory fish stocks crashed after Santo Antônio and Jirau dams were built, say researchers.

Animals around the globe are losing ground to farming and ranching, and their numbers are dwindling at the hands of human hunters. But the question of where to direct precious…

LIMA, Peru — In February, Peruvian authorities evicted thousands of illegal gold miners from Amazon lands they were deforesting and poisoning with mercury. The government announced plans to set up military…

Giraffes have to search a wider area for food and water when people live nearby, according to a recent study. “Giraffes are huge browsing animals that live in African savanna…