Franciso Sornoza, an ornithologist at the National Institute of Biodiversity in Quito, Ecuador, was hiking in the country’s southwestern highlands when a small bird caught his eye. It was perched…
A new map plots out the last known refuges of hundreds of highly threatened species around the world. The assessment updates work done by the Alliance for Zero Extinction, or…
“To leave my dream was difficult, but I had to do it for my son,” says Ileana Herrera, a former ecologist from Venezuela, now living in Ecuador. Herrera, like many…
Little by little, the ocean floor of Chapaco Bay is being blanketed in sludge. Héctor Zuleta is no longer able to harvest shellfish from among the caves, ridges and woodlands…
Scientists have mapped out instances of human-black bear conflict in a part of the U.S. state of Nevada where bears are returning decades after they vanished. The results of their…
Authorities in Madagascar confiscated 7,347 radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) from wildlife traffickers on Oct. 24, just months after a similar bust led to the seizure of nearly 10,000 tortoises of…
A single log of rosewood from Madagascar can sell for thousands of dollars in China, and a bed made from the wood can cost as much as $1 million. But…
A herd of zebra now roams the southern highlands of Tanzania for the first time since the 1960s. Staff from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and its partners released 24…
Children in every corner of the globe can identify an elephant in a wildlife lineup. They are as recognizable as any basic shape and as endearing as any household pet.…
New research finds that one-third of critical jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco, South America’s largest tropical dry forest, has been lost since the mid-1980s. According to the study, led…
Biologist Joel Berger endures extreme conditions to study muskoxen and learn about the opportunities — and limits — of behavioral flexibility in a fast changing climate.
Few plants capture the imagination quite like orchids. When orchid fever gripped England in the early 1800s, wealthy aristocrats sent out orchid hunters to forests around the world in search…
JAKARTA — Locals and activists have denounced plans to build tourism infrastructure in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, a string of sun-kissed islands best known for their resident giant lizards. Developers…
Nobody knows just how much rosewood Madagascar’s timber barons have hidden away in caches throughout the country. Buried in the sand, sunken in rivers, or tucked away in remote, walled…
The Trump Administration has unveiled a plan to revise regulations that implement portions of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), which conservationists say would cripple the law adopted in 1973…
In a counterintuitive surprise, a new study finds that fish species evolve more than twice as rapidly at the poles than in the tropics. The reason why isn’t currently known.
Climate change is reshaping relations between parks, people and the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. But more and deeper research is needed to determine likely long-term impacts.
According to a study published in the journal PloS One late last year, the Brazilian Amazon has about 2.3 million square kilometers (nearly 900,000 square miles) of land suitable for…
JAKARTA — At least six illegal logging camps have sprung up in a peat forest in Indonesian Borneo that the government had declared off-limits last year, a Greenpeace investigation has…
Eight years ago, researchers described a new species of monkey based on a single dead specimen — an individual that had been hunted from a remote, mountainous forest in Myanmar’s…
The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has become a crisis for wildlife and zoo animals too, as a hungry, desperate population hunts wild species for food.
Lemurs in Madagascar have been under pressure from deforestation, poaching, drought and other challenges for years. Now, in the much-visited Berenty Reserve near the island’s southern tip, one species faces…
Venezuela’s ongoing economic crisis has helped trigger an illegal invasion by squatters into a University of the Andes research forest, a refuge of the Critically Endangered brown spider monkey.
Leveraging the most comprehensive dataset ever compiled for the gorillas and chimpanzees that live in western Central Africa, scientists have concluded that there are more of the two subspecies than…
Carving up rainforests to make room for farming, ranching and other uses induces a host of changes into the ecosystem, many of which scientists are only just beginning to understand.…
Frogs can survive in oil palm plantations, but at the cost of diversity of species — and the impact can radiate out deep into neighboring forest ecosystems, according to a…
Conservationists recently awoke to the extraordinary value of the Cerrado - a biodiverse biome long outshone by the Amazon and a key carbon sink; but agribusiness is fast destroying it.
With the Arctic winter of 2017-18 the warmest on record, researchers are finding a troubling range of climate change impacts on wildlife, including wolverines, reindeer, snowy owls, and more.
Bearded pigs in Malaysian Borneo appear to have adapted to oil palm plantations, a key driver of deforestation in the region, but still depend heavily on adjacent forests as their…
On Tuesday, a federal judge in California ruled that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not abuse its authority in waiving dozens of environmental laws to build sections of…