Habitat Degradation News

The canary in the coal mine for how climate change is affecting the treasure trove of biodiversity in the Amazon is … also a bird. Dozens of them, in fact,…

Defeat for Japan’s opposition party in last month’s national elections has dashed hopes for a quick resolution to the contentious relocation of a U.S. military base on the island of…

JAKARTA — Protecting all remaining orangutans and their forest habitat in Indonesia will provide a bastion for the survival of Asia’s only great ape, wildlife experts say in a new…

ACEH BESAR, Indonesia — A Sumatran elephant calf has died days after conservation officials in Indonesia amputated half of her trunk due to severe injuries from a suspected snare trap.…

JAMBI, Indonesia — Conservation authorities in Indonesia have reported the death of a Sumatran tiger captured in October following reports of deadly attacks on people. Officials have linked the death…

IKOM, Nigeria — When 57-year-old Linus Otu was a child, each dawn arrived with the chatter of monkeys and occasional belches of gorillas from the mountain that overlooks his small…

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…

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…

On a cold and humid morning in March, two bird surveyors stood in the dim forests of Kenaboi State Park in Malaysia, straining their ears for birdsong. From where they…

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…

The first signal of the day is the sun stretching steadily upward amid a gigantic sea of mountains. The mass of rock, forest and water is so huge that the…

On a clear night in 2017, a team of students from Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) set out into a lowland forest on the southwest coast of Java, Indonesia’s most…

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…

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…

Hariyo "Beebach" Wibisono studies Javan leopards, the last remaining apex predator on Indonesia's island of Java, which, with a land area about the size of Alabama, is also home to…

As recently as 1980, hunters in the forests of the Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea could count on bagging at least a couple of tree kangaroos in a…

Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos face a bleak future thanks to a perfect storm of human-driven factors, a recent study shows. The triple whammy of the climate crisis, growing human population,…

In an undisturbed ecosystem, elephants move across the landscape in response to the availability of food and water and the type of habitat or competition. But according to a continent-wide…

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) contains the bulk of Africa’s humid rainforest. But forests that were once dense, impenetrable and continuous are increasingly fractured by deforestation. New satellite…

JAKARTA — An Indonesian company with ties to Japanese conglomerates has cleared large swaths of rainforests, including habitat for critically endangered orangutans, according to a report. The company, Alas Kusuma,…

In a far-flung stretch of the Brazilian Amazon, the dense rainforest is slowly giving way to neat rows of oil palm that stretch for miles. Beyond the plantations, a narrow…

For the past several years, the Colombian Amazon has been hit harder by deforestation than any other region in the country, according to the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology, and Environmental…

It was 11:30 in the morning on Feb. 4 this year. A gray sky threatened heavy rains. Everything was calm as usual at the front gate of the Brejão Farm,…

When people think about apes in the connection with Sumatra, they will mainly picture the charismatic orangutans that are capturing international attention as well as conservation efforts. The attention for…

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…

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…

At the beginning of the 1990s, while observing the large trees of the Amazon ceding ground to the scrub-like vegetation of the Cerrado, in a process driven by human activity,…

Update: The five activists were released on February 8 after they "signed an agreement not to enter restricted areas without permission," as Reuters reported. On Friday afternoon Kratie provincial environment…