Deforestation driven by illegal mining around Peru’s Pariamanu River has accelerated in the past six months, with forests one and a half times the size of London’s Hyde Park lost…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the world’s largest otter and largest member…
As the biodiversity of freshwater fish declines, what does this mean for human nutrition? Declining fish diversity in the Loreto department of the Peruvian Amazon could affect nutrition for many…
The satellite’s eye view from high above northern Peru in mid-2013 laid out a stark reality: Ecologist Matt Finer and his colleagues were watching “blow by blow” in a series of…
Fénix, a female Chaco eagle, lived at San Rafael Zoo in Mendoza province, Argentina, until the zoo shut down in 2016. She was later transferred to the Buenos Aires Ecopark,…
The past year has been difficult for much of Latin America: The pandemic has hit the region harder than most, a series of natural and manmade disasters has adversely impacted…
Editor's note: Tim Killeen provides an update on the state of the Amazon in his new book “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness – Success and Failure in the…
The kelp forests of the oceans are a habitat for a wide range of marine species, rivaling even the great tropical forests for sheer richness of biodiversity, according to scientists…
The fondness for bird watching is so much a part of the life of “the birders” that it is even unconscious. Without realizing it, I am listening and watching our…
After nearly twenty years of discussion, the Peruvian government has moved to establish a new Indigenous reserve for "uncontacted peoples" deep in the Amazon rainforest. Yavarí Tapiche Indigenous Reserve, which…
Mongabay caught up with Igarapé Institute co-founder Robert Muggah this week to discuss Ecocrime, a new data visualization platform that combines visual storytelling with access to raw data on environmental crime…
I’ve lost count of the number of times, working as a journalist across Latin America, that I’ve met, spoken to, or heard from or about Indigenous peoples and other local…
The Amazon basin lost more than 2 million hectares of primary forest cover in 2020, according to a new satellite data analysis released today. The authors say this likely eclipses…
The old adage of "money talks" is being given a modern data analysis stress test and applied to the assassinations of civil society activists in the global mining sector. In…
Mario’s nervousness is evident on the other end of the phone as he speaks about how three men tried to stab him in November 2020. This wasn’t the first time something…
When Yuri Hooker was young, he lived on the coast of Huanchaco in northern Peru. He grew up fascinated by the creatures and objects he found by the sea, and…
Between 2010 and 2020, South America lost an average of 2.6 million hectares of forest per year, according the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In other…
Like virtually everything in 2020, COVID-19 defined the year for tropical rainforests. Conservation was particularly hard hit in tropical countries.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented a travel moratorium for staff and contributing journalists in March 2020. In practice, this meant we stopped assigning stories that required travel…
Today we have two stories about the impacts of mining and some of the new and innovative ways conservationists are attempting to deal with those impacts. Listen here: Our first…
A local court in Peru today reversed a ruling against employees of a company charged with illegal deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, effectively absolving them of crimes associated with converting…
Flor de María Paraná, 47, describes the bleakest moment of her life as the one that made her the leader she is today. "It was the day that everything changed,"…
“The invasions do not stop, the deforestation does not stop, and the threats do not stop,” Iván Flores Rodríguez said by phone from the Indigenous Santa Clara de Uchunya community.…
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,…
As more trees die in the Amazon Basin, the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide weakens. But to understand why trees are dying at a faster rate, researchers first need…
In 2016, conservation biologist Holly O’Donnell was striding through the Amazon rainforest in southwestern Peru, recording every mammal she saw or heard while performing a line transect survey for the…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the tayra. Tayras are part of the…
Sitting in the doorway of his house, Isaac Zacharías Klassen, the patriarch of a Mennonite colony that has settled in Masisea, in Peru’s Amazonian department of Ucayali, says he was…
In the Peruvian Amazon, two Indigenous groups have been battling the government and oil companies for decades to prevent an incursion they believe would forever alter their homeland. An immense…
When a peregrine falcon crashed through the skylight of a high-rise building in Lima, Peru, what impressed falcon researchers was not its tremendous speed (peregrines are the fastest animal…