Dry Forests News

EL PALMAR, Bolivia — It was worth the journey. After sweating across the scrubby Bolivian mountainsides, stepping into the forest was like entering a different world. Twisted pino de monte…

After Brazil, the South American country that lost the greatest area of primary forest over the past twenty years is Bolivia. The land-locked nation has seen its diverse forests rapidly…

There’s a tree-planting frenzy everywhere you look. In August 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India announced that more than a million Indians had planted 220 million trees…

Experts see sustainable small-scale cultivation of endemic fruits, nuts and vegetables by traditional communities as a way to value and save Cerrado ecosystems, while also supporting some of the biome’s best defenders.

The Kalunga — 39 quilombola communities, the descendants of runaway slaves — have united with international funders to use high-tech georeferencing to catalog their traditional lands and natural resources in Brazil.

With no natural predators to worry about, jaguars (Panthera onca) roam the forests of South and Central America. This feline is found in 18 countries, but only 4% of its…

It was August 26, 2020. Dirlene Mejía, a park ranger who works in the area around Concepción Lake, a protected area located in eastern Bolivia, had just left for her…

There’s nowhere on Earth quite like Madagascar when it comes to the sheer wealth and wonder of biodiversity. But along with its natural richness, the island nation is beset by…

An innovative collaborative group is working to restore Brazil’s savanna by sowing native plant seeds on degraded agricultural lands; it’s an effort that’s working, say participants.

Eight French supermarket chains will now require that their suppliers obtain soybeans that were not grown on deforested land, according to the Washington, D.C.-based environmental NGO Mighty Earth. The announcement…

Maned wolves, pumas, giant anteaters, tapirs and other Neotropical mammals are threatened with local extinctions unless more conserved areas are established in Brazil’s savanna biome, say scientists.

Located in northeastern Brazil, the Caatinga, with its shrublands and dry forests, is seen by many as poor in biodiversity. As a consequence, the region receives little investment for conservation…

By March 25, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had already crossed much of the world, leaving a trail of death and despair in its wake. Argentina was no exception: Five days…

It was late afternoon deep in the dry season in Fatikh, a village in the Sahel region of Senegal. Out on his farm, El Hadj Ndiaye, a distinguished gentleman in…

Agribusiness entities that deforested vast swaths of the Cerrado biome in Brazil to grow corn are now suffering a drop in production because of climate changes brought about by their own actions.

The barbed terrain forged by the tsingy topography in western Madagascar has, for millions of years, sheltered the dry forests that grow between the limestone spires. This year, even before the fire…

Last year the world lost some 119,000 square kilometers (45,946 square miles) of tree cover – an area the size of Nicaragua – according to satellite data collated by the…

Scraping sounds fill the nights at Mapungubwe, a national park at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers, where the borders of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa meet. Families…

Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.

The Brazilian savanna has always been a dry place, but the massive conversion of native vegetation to soy is making it far dryer, as is deepening, climate change-driven, drought.

The land rights of quilombos — communities of runaway slave descendants —are assured by Brazil’s Constitution; but those rights are now largely disregarded by agribusiness and Bolsonaro.

Ranching is booming in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco, destroying the biome, but the nation’s goal of breaking into sustainable beef and leather markets may offer a motive to curb deforestation.

After enduring a fraught election process that resulted in the resignation of president Evo Morales in November 2019, Bolivia will once again be holding a general election in 2020. Meanwhile,…

Late last year, historic wildfires raged through Bolivia, holding the country hostage for two months between July and September and burning more than 5 million hectares (50,000 sq km or…

After decades of suppressing fire, park managers in Brazil’s savanna are relying on indigenous and traditional fire knowledge and Integrated Fire Management as a conservation tool.

The guanaco (Lama guanicoe), the spindly, wild forebear of the llama, ranges across a broad reach of western and southern South America. While the species as a whole is not…

JAKARTA — Indonesian President Joko Widodo has demanded accountability from his top officials over the land and forest fires that hit the country last year, as the government braces for…

Two Darwin's rheas (Rhea pennata) run at full speed between the thorny bushes and tall grasslands that cover the paleobasin – an ancient river basin and floodplain near the Bermejo…

JAKARTA — An Indonesian court has fined an palm oil company $1.8 million for fires that occurred on its concession in 2015, capping a four-year ordeal by the government to…

JAKARTA — Land and forest fires in Indonesia cost the country $5.2 billion in damage and economic losses this year, equivalent to 0.5% of its economy, according to a new…