Over the past two decades, orangutan researcher Marc Ancrenaz watched as a tidal wave of oil palm has engulfed his once-forested research sites in northern Borneo. When he would find…
The world’s leaders, private companies and individuals must take a coordinated approach to address three environmental calamities facing the Earth at this moment, according to a report released Feb. 18…
The Sumatran rhino is a cute but cryptic species that teeters on the brink: with an estimated 80 individuals left in the wilds of its super dense rainforest home, experts…
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…
Since the 2018 emergence of African swine fever in China, the viral disease has torn through Asia, leaving behind a trail of economic devastation. It’s witheringly fatal to pigs but…
In July 2019, Australian authorities on the island of Tasmania received a report of a footprint spotted by an unnamed individual on a walk up to Sleeping Beauty Mountain in…
In 1992, global leaders gathered at a United Nations summit in Rio de Janeiro to sign the landmark Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to promote sustainable development. Eighteen years later,…
The native vegetation of Brazil’s vast savanna is rapidly being replaced by plantations and pastures. At risk along with the biome’s grasslands are hundreds of endemic, uniquely adapted reptile species.
BANDAR LAMPUNG, Indonesia — A brief clip recorded in October last year by a camera trap deep in the forest of Way Kambas National Park in Sumatra piqued the interest…
JAMBI, Indonesia — Armed with a flashlight, 43-year-old Musadat walks slowly through the thick and dense Harapan forest, one of the last remaining expanses of lowland tropical rainforest on the…
An intergovernmental organization representing countries that produce the bulk of the world’s timber has thrown its support behind a decade-long effort to protect the last remaining primary forest in the…
JAKARTA — An upgrade to a road that cuts through one of Southeast Asia’s last great swaths of intact rainforest is driving deeper encroachment by humans into blocks of forest…
JAKARTA — Onrizal Onrizal remembers hearing stories of human-like creatures living in the forest when he was growing up in Sungai Dareh, a town in western Sumatra, Indonesia. Legend had…
Humans are driving species to extinction 1,000 times faster than what is considered natural. Now, new research underscores the extent of the planet's impoverishment. Extinctions don't just rob the planet of species…
All told, this was a pretty bleak year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought tragedy and confusion; fires razed parts of Australia, the Amazon, and the Western U.S.; and the world is…
1. The ocean in a worldwide pandemic As the year that challenged the world with a widespread pandemic draws to a close, COVID-19 has affected almost every aspect of life…
Editor's note: Widodo died of COVID-19 on December 24, 2020. BOGOR, Indonesia — Indonesian biologist Widodo Sukohadi Ramono is one of the longest-standing and most influential figures in the country’s…
The bison circled four times around the holding pen, before the lead animals took them into the 3,400-hectare (8,500-acre) pasture, their new home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the…
By the time the war broke out in Syria, researchers from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) had already duplicated and safely transported most of…
In the arctic tundra of northeastern Siberia lies a graveyard of a now-extinct species of megafauna, the woolly rhinoceros, dating back 50,000 years. Now, a new genomic analysis of the…
Tim Beatley will humbly tell you that he’s not a birder. But in his new book, there are enough appearances by obscure members of the class Aves to suggest that…
The illegal wildlife trade is out of control in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, says the award-winning NGO known as RENCTAS, which tracked 3.5 million wildlife trafficking ads on social networks last year.
The growing consensus that the earth is in the throes of a sixth mass extinction has focused attention on a centuries-old ecological puzzle: why do species suddenly disappear by the…
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — For the rhinos of Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem, snare traps set by poachers are a key factor that threatens to drive them closer to extinction. The Leuser…
This article is a one year follow up to the award-winning series, The Great Insect Dying published in June, 2019 on Mongabay. The original series documents insect losses in Europe, the U.S. and the tropics — here’s what we know today.
The Sumatran rhino, like the land that it inhabits, is unlike anything else in this world: small in stature and docile by nature, the animal sports a coat of black…
On a humid morning in 2019, Lily Xu watched as a patrolling ranger driving a motorbike down a remote forest road in Cambodia signaled his group to stop and pull…
Avoiding the loss of human life and the economic fallout caused by future pandemics will require a seismic change in our approach to the causes of the emergence of disease-causing…
The rainforest of Lopé National Park in central Gabon is one of the last safe havens for the endangered forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). But in a new study in Science,…
The Arctic is setting records for low sea ice extent for this time of year, with the 2020 refreeze now 500,000+ square kilometers behind a record set in 2019 — a sign the region may be entering a new climate regime.
