Forest Fragmentation News

JAKARTA — Conservation groups are calling on the Asian Development Bank to tighten its scrutiny of a road project it plans to fund in Indonesian Borneo that may pose risks…

RIO DE JANEIRO – Horto, a secluded neighborhood in the south of Rio de Janeiro with a view of the famed Christ the Redeemer statue, is enveloped by forest. Tropical…

Before the clearing and excavators and bulldozers, before plans to build a gold mine and oil palm plantations, the Jemaluang and Tenggaroh forest reserves in Johor, Malaysia, were wildlife-rich jungles…

In August 2019, an unprecedented number of fires ripped through the Brazilian Amazon, sparking worldwide interest in reports of burning rainforest. In fact, the majority of blazes were on land…

Jorhat, INDIA - A lone hoolock gibbon jumps from one tree branch to another before taking a big final leap across the railway tracks that fragment its forested home into…

Biologists often refer to the Wallacea region of Indonesia as a “living laboratory” for the study of evolution. Spanning 1,680 of Indonesia’s central islands, including the Malukus, Nusa Tenggara and…

Peering back over the last 120,000 years, scientists have uncovered where chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) rode out past periods of global change, providing insights into how they might be affected by…

As demonstrations and deadly crackdowns continue to roil Myanmar following the military coup in February, land and environmental defenders are increasingly under threat. In the seven months since protests erupted,…

It’s easier to spot the bristly, gray-brown hide of a Bornean bearded pig (Sus barbatus) ambling through orderly rows of oil palm trees, than amid a dense tropical forest. But…

DELHI NCR — Sunil Harsana says he always knew there were paintings in the caves near his home in Mangar, a village on the outskirts of India’s capital, New Delhi.…

Every few years, stretches of Borneo’s towering dipterocarp trees fruit in a synchronized pulse. In those months, the air is rich with brown, winged fruit, which fall and spin to…

I’ve been writing about wild things for more than 10 years, and while there are many animals I don’t know, I thought I’d at least heard of most of the…

Tigers once roamed throughout the dense forested interior of mainland Southeast Asia and several islands of Indonesia. Positioned at the pinnacle of the food chain, tigers maintain ecosystem balance, and…

Swinging lithely from branch to branch high up in the forest canopy, a family of hoolock gibbons hoots vigorously to guard its territory against intruders. A type of small ape…

The Philippines is made up of more than 7,000 islands, supporting an extraordinary number of species that occur nowhere else on the planet. Eighty-six new endemic bird species have been…

An environmental report has revealed the Malaysian royal family is requesting permission from the Department of Environment for a new iron ore mine in the middle of one of the…

In 2006, the world's leading hummingbird photographer, Luis Mazariegos, visited La Mesenia, an isolated village in Colombia’s western Andes. He had no idea that besides taking a picture of the…

Today we discuss newly released data for 2020 that shows an increase in deforestation even as efforts to replant forests are sprouting up all over the world. Listen here: Mongabay…

The area of protected land on Earth has increased to seven times the size of India since 2010, according to a report released May 19 by the United Nations Environmental…

It’s midday in summer, the mercury climbing above 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), and nature guide Nuno Roxo is leading us on a hike in Guadiana Valley National Park in Portugal.…

Indonesia’s Kerinci Seblat National Park is the largest national park on the island of Sumatra and the second-largest park in Southeast Asia. It is home to a wide variety of…

Major roadbuilding, including the “reconstruction” of the BR-319 highway, now threatens the Brazilian Amazon’s last, vast intact rainforest, vital to Brazilian ecosystem services.

The reconstruction of the BR-319 highway — a north-south cut through what remains of Brazil’s Amazon forest — is being fast tracked by Pres. Bolsonaro, but the project risks huge socio-environmental impacts.

337,427 square kilometers of Amazon forest were degraded between 1992 and 2014 ¬(mostly due to logging and understory fires), compared to 308,311 square kilometers completely cleared.

Humans have not treaded lightly on the Earth. Over the centuries, we have left our mark on almost every ecosystem, contributing to a steady, and increasingly rapid, decline in the…

New Guinea's diversity of life, cultures and landscapes has long inspired prominent scientists, from Alfred Russel Wallace to Jared Diamond. Sitting just below the equator at the nexus of Asia…

Wary of Western medicine and of the prejudice and neglect they say they suffer at hospitals, Amazon's Kokama people decided to turn to traditional healing practices, administered by shamans. The Kokama were the first Indigenous group in Brazil to be infected with COVID-19, and to date there have been more than a thousand confirmed cases and 60 deaths within the community.

Brazil is well positioned to benefit from forest restoration and agroforestry, but policies in states like Maranhão fail to address that potential and could contribute to further deforestation.

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.

Turtles and tortoises in trouble  On the island of Madagascar, locked gates, razor-wire fences, and 24-hour armed guards protect one of the world’s rarest treasures. That treasure, worth roughly $50,000…