Parks News

In the early 1990s, using the money they earned from their leadership roles at Patagonia Inc., The North Face, and Esprit, Kris and Doug Tompkins began buying up vast amounts…

Rodger Schlickeisen made a name for himself in conservation circles from the early 1990s thanks to his leadership at Defenders of Wildlife, which grew rapidly in membership and influence during…

The Naso Tjër Di people of Panama now have a protected territory of their own. The creation of the 1,600-square-kilometer (620-square-mile) comarca, as it’s called in Panama, came as a…

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…

Mileva "Gara" Jovanović's family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest…

For years, Anthony Caere, an anti-poaching pilot at Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), peered through the windows of his helicopter to see a landscape mostly…

Brazil’s Serra do Divisor National Park is at risk from a BR-364 branch road running from Acre state to Peru. Brazil’s Congress is about to strip away the park’s protections, risking wholesale deforestation.

Poaching is a pervasive global problem, and iconic mammals like elephants and rhinos are hit hard by illegal hunting. This is especially true in the world’s poorest countries and within…

When Benjamín Rodríguez Grandez, an Indigenous leader in the Putumayo region of the Amazon in northern Peru, became sick with apparent COVID-19 symptoms in July, he was evacuated to Iquitos,…

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.

Gorongosa National Park has quite a history, from its inception 60 years ago to being battleground the subsequent Mozambique civil war, to its recent revitalization and engagement with the human…

The world’s protected areas are largely a jumble of disjointed refuges, separated from each other by the encroachment of human impacts, a recent study has found. Fewer than 10% of…

HO CHI MINH CITY — In a move wildlife conservationists are hailing as a victory, Vietnam has established a new nature reserve encompassing critical habitat for numerous species, several of…

“Sorry, I need to take it,” says Leitah Mkhabela, supervisor for the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit, when her phone buzzes a few minutes into our interview. When she calls back,…

ANALAMAZAOTRA NATIONAL PARK, Madagascar — Hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic, Madagascar’s tourism industry took its first step toward recovery. On Sept. 5, the quasi-governmental agency Madagascar National Parks (MNP) reopened…

It might be hard to believe in the current political climate, but public lands were a unifying issue for Americans until quite recently. Most Americans have supported the idea of…

* This story is a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam and GK of Ecuador. Instability and financial crisis wrought by COVID-19 have reached the national parks of Ecuador. On June…

African Parks Network (APN) recently announced it would formally take over the management of the Benin side of W National Park, which comprises a major portion of the largest intact…

While MRN, a mining firm makes big profits working within, and harming, a Brazilian conservation unit, traditional people can be fined for collecting Brazil nuts and fishing sustainably in a nearby protected area.

On July 23rd, 2020, we Mozambicans celebrated the 60th birthday of our flagship national park: Gorongosa. It is located in the center of our country and is a symbol of…

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — This spring, Madagascar lost a prominent champion of the country’s system of protected areas. Guy Suzon Ramangason, a former director-general of Madagascar National Parks (MNP), the quasi-governmental…

In his 2006 book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, science writer David Quammen says, “Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire…

As a young boy living on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wizipan Little Elk remembers the first time he saw a buffalo herd. The experience ignited a passion, and at…

BOGOR, Indonesia — For nearly a century it was thought to be a separate population of a gecko species found in Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island. Now, the bent-toed gecko found in…

More than a decade of illegal gold mining around the upstart town of La Pampa in the Peruvian Amazon has tainted local water supplies, razed forests adjacent to a world-class…

Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) may be avoiding their neighbors, according to a new study that presents evidence of territoriality among gorilla groups in the Republic of Congo. Using…

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.

A new analysis based on estimated deforestation in the Amazon in 2019 pinpoints hotspots of forest loss and identifies several country-specific trends in the region. The figures project that deforestation…

Governments could vastly improve the efficiency of money spent on conservation if they took a hard look at the species they prioritize, according to a recent study. The research probed…

2019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…