California News

2018 was a difficult year for the world's tropical rainforests. Below are of some of the biggest rainforest storylines for the year, but we couldn't cover everything, so if there…

On a midsummer evening earlier this year, Tracy Pham was on a walk along Huntington Beach, California, an outing she usually made to photograph birds. This time, along the way,…

ORLEANS, California — Frank Lake stoops beside a low-growing shrub, cups one hand beneath a cluster of cobalt berries and swiftly claps it to his mouth. The purple-lipped grin he flashes…

The millions of waterbirds that migrate each spring from South America to as far as the Arctic can’t do it in one trip. They stop to rest and refuel several…

A group of 17 philanthropic foundations has committed at least $459 million through 2022 in support of land-based solutions to climate change — including forest conservation and restoration — and…

As governors of tropical forest states and provinces descend upon San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit and the annual meeting of the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force,…

Protecting tropical forests is key to mitigating climate change. When California Governor Jerry Brown convenes the Global Climate Action Summit next week, he should seize the opportunity to make an…

Working under cover of night in parks as large as US states, poachers are skilled in avoiding detection. If they kill with silencers on their rifles, the animal’s death is…

California Governor Jerry Brown has done nearly everything within his reach to solve climate change. When he hosts the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September, he can…

A group of prominent scientists is calling on California governor Jerry Brown to incorporate tropical forest conservation into the state's cap-and-trade regulation ahead of next month's Global Climate Action Summit,…

When large wildfires in the forests of the western United States generate dramatic headlines, it can be particularly tempting for climate activists to adopt negative messages about wildfire and link…

Lighten up We’ve all seen insects fly toward light. Moths, for example, use moonlight to stay upright, fly straight, and remain oriented at night. Other groups of animals, including various…

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…

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…

Scientists have for the first time captured extensive visual documentation of predation events that underpin deep-sea food webs. The research, which relies on hundreds of video observations captured over nearly…

This week’s podcast featured a discussion between Mongabay’s founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler and Jane Goodall, the world’s most recognizable conservationist and one of this media outlet’s esteemed advisory…

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…

Steven Kotler is a leading thinker on how technology can be employed to halt the global loss of biodiversity. Recently the prolific author and journalist convened a weekend forum for…

In the late 1950s, a young graduate student from Switzerland named Hansjörg Wyss took a summer job with the Colorado Highway Department. In his free time, he explored, climbed, and…

During the 2016 fishing season, 71 whales were entangled off the coast of Washington, Oregon, and California, the highest number ever recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).…

As the planet warms, the soil underfoot could release more carbon than previously thought, a new study has found. “Previously, I think people thought that the surface is what matters,”…

Thanks to a five-year acoustic monitoring program, conservationists have detected the rapid decline of the vaquita before it is too late – giving them one last shot to save the…

Swimming 4 meters per second, a feeding blue whale swings open its jaws and, in four seconds, swallows 140 percent of its mass—a volume of water and krill the size…

In October, last year, the state of California banned the sale of nearly all ivory and rhino horn. The new law makes it illegal to trade almost all ivory, including…

Many amphibians worldwide are facing extinction, but one frog in California’s Yosemite National Park is defying the trend. Researchers in the park were surprised to witness a large-scale recovery of…

Wildtech interviews Jennifer Gabrys, author of the book Program Earth, which discusses emerging sensor technologies and the cultural implications of an ever more “wired up” planet.

Inside a dark, marble cavern in Sequoia National Park, California, scientists have discovered a new species of a very “leggy” millipede. The tiny thread-like millipede has 414 legs, and is…

Preoccupied with snipping a saliva-soaked plant part with a scalpel and placing it in a little tube of viral transport media, veterinary epidemiologist Tierra Smiley Evans thought she was alone,…

On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, in an unincorporated part of Los Gatos in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains, I’m scaling a 200-foot tall, somewhere between 600-1000 year…

Government and company officials in California and Oregon have reached an agreement to remove four large hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in the hopes that it will restore the…