Ancient bald cypress trees tower along the Black River in the state of North Carolina in the United States. Many of these living trees are over a thousand years old,…
Sometimes looking for rare plants can mean taking extreme steps. And for decades, botanists at the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), a nonprofit based on the island of Kauaʻi in…
Ritidian, a cliff-top refuge on the island of Guam, is one of the last places in the Pacific where you can find the mossy pillars and plunging crevices of a…
In January this year, a drone surveying a cliff face in a remote part of Kalalau Valley on the Hawaiin island of Kaua‘i chanced upon something unexpected: In one of…
On a gloomy afternoon in May 2018, conservation biologist Bibhab Talukdar was visiting Pobitora National Park in India's Assam state. As he rode an elephant into the grasslands at the…
“Why on earth would anyone give up working on tigers to focus on freshwater fish?” is the question I am asked most frequently since becoming the Executive Director of Shoal,…
Wearing nothing more than leaves hanging from belts of woven vegetation, the three scientists stand in the rain with little idea of what to expect. They’ve lived and worked with…
Attitudes toward grasshoppers and other leggy insects were immortalized in popular culture with Disney Pixar’s 1998 animated hit “A Bug’s Life.” “They come, they eat, they leave,” a main character…
SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA, Colombia — Asdrúbal Torres Torres places the thin, opaque leaf between his cheek and gums and begins to chew a sacred plant that has perhaps…
Droughts can transform tropical forests. They kill trees and slow their growth. They also affect microbes that are critical to keeping the forest soil healthy. But termites, better known for…
Once again this year, researchers described several new species of animals and plants after months, or even several years, of trials and tribulations. Some were tiny, like the Japan pig,…
Reports of illegal trafficking in elephant ivory or rhino horn abound, but plants are actually more frequent victims of the illicit trade than wildlife. In fact, roughly 30,000 of the…
New research finds that seed banking alone is not sufficient to conserve the world’s threatened plant and tree species. According to a paper published in the journal Nature Plants this…
Very few tropical forests around the world enjoy uninterrupted contiguity. Most are divided into uneven, small fragments, cut off from each other, their boundaries marked by roads or farms. But as…
The fires closing in on Erika Berenguer’s research site in Brazil’s eastern Amazon were unlike anything she had seen in years working in the forest. Smoke hung heavy the air.…
Nearly 70 years ago, Edwin Ujor of the Nigerian Forestry Service collected a specimen of a tree from a forest high up in the Bamenda highlands in Cameroon. The specimen…
JAKARTA — Organizers of the recently concluded Asian Games in Indonesia had been braced for the worst-case scenario: forest fires flaring up and shrouding Palembang, one of the host cities,…
More isolated oceanic islands harbor fewer native species due to the fact that plants and animals are less capable of naturally dispersing to and colonizing those islands. This is known…
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 — Songbird owners in Indonesia are up in arms over the recent inclusion of hundreds of bird species in the national list of protected animals. The owners plan to…
