CAPE TOWN — Evidence of mice attacking albatross chicks on Marion Island, midway between South Africa and Antarctica, makes for grim viewing. One video, captured at a colony of endangered…
When battling to protect Indonesia's peatlands during wildfire crises in 2015 and 2019, most volunteer firefighters confronted the infernos with a dire shortage of equipment and technological resources. For community…
Found only in Southeast Asian rainforests, the Rafflesia genus produces the world’s largest flowers. Their prodigious size is no small feat, considering that Rafflesia possess neither roots, leaves nor stems.…
For Jake Robinson, Greno Woods was an easy choice. This large, old forest in South Yorkshire county in the U.K. has historically undergone timber harvesting, quarrying and fires. Plantations of…
The soybean industry is one of the largest drivers of deforestation today, with over 75.5 million hectares (186.5 million acres) cultivated across the globe, according to the FAO. An overwhelming…
With the disappearance of European empires, many associated internationally important natural history museums (NHMs) are struggling to continue. They are being underfunded, short-staffed; collections split up and hived off. Many…
Colombia has nearly 60 million hectares (147.5 million acres) of natural forest covering over half its territory, much of it in the Amazon basin. As a “megadiverse” country, possessing around…
More carbon is stored in the soil than in all plants, animals and the atmosphere combined, making it among the most critical conservation frontiers as we face the climate crisis.…
It seems a cache of biodiversity data was hiding in plain sight all along. In the midst of hazardous particulate matter trapped in the filters of two air quality monitoring…
“People need to think about river basins or freshwater systems like a heart, a living system,” says Bernardo Caldas, from WWF-Brasil. Caldas is the co-lead author of a new study…
Climate change impacts could cost countries in Central America up to $314 billion per year by 2100 if ecosystem services provided by the region’s forests are affected, a recent study…
SINGAPORE — Macaques look on from trees as a round of applause breaks out. After repeated attempts, a team has managed to fly a drone and drop a sensor platform…
Sustainable liquid biofuels are needed to reduce the carbon footprint of fossil fuel-powered planes, ships, trucks and cars. Grass feedstock has shown promise in biofuel labs, but commercial scaling up may be an insurmountable hurdle.
JAKARTA — Reports of human rights violations continue to mount around a major tourism development on the Indonesian island of Lombok, two years since the United Nations first flagged problems…
Beneath the luxurious foliage and the majestic trees of the Amazon Rainforest lies a counterintuitive reality: a mostly infertile soil that becomes swiftly depleted once its plant coverage is stripped…
A new program in Hawai‘i will draw on the collaborative efforts of science and community to restore local corals and coastlines to make reef communities more resilient in the future.…
Plants and fungi struck a deal way back when. More than 400 million years ago, plants began trading sugar made from sunlight (a.k.a. carbon) for some of the soil nutrients…
KATHMANDU — With the start of the monsoon season in Nepal in mid-June, rivers originating from the mountains and the hills of the country become swollen and reach the peak…
In a May-June meeting 135 nations agreed to press forward and write a draft of a strong international treaty regulating plastics, though some nations including the U.S., China and Saudi Arabia resisted a binding agreement.
It took several days of observation before researchers and local fishermen found the best way to catch the Amazon river dolphins they were studying in the largest lake in the…
Climate change has been shown to affect the timing of reproduction in birds. Studies investigating the effects of higher temperatures have found that many bird species have started breeding earlier…
A survey of all five vertebrate groups — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish — plus insects, found nearly half of populations are shrinking, while just 3% are increasing, overwhelmingly due to human pressures.
Researchers analyzed never-before-used satellite data to calculate how much carbon is stored in protected areas worldwide.
SINGAPORE — It’s been a hectic few weeks for Kevin Marriott. On a humid May morning in Singapore, he shuttles between two locations at the city’s Windsor Nature Park. At…
When it comes to mapping green cover, it's easy to miss the trees for the forest. New research suggests that there are a lot of missed trees: almost 30% of…
COLOMBO — In Lewis Carroll’s popular children’s book “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice finds a magical mushroom that could make her bigger or smaller. There are many references to wild mushrooms…
Flitting through the forest foliage, darting between branches and flawlessly negotiating their way around gargantuan tree trunks, bats have evolved exquisite adaptations to their forest homes. Although inaudible to human…
Interbreeding with domestic cats, and also with other wildcat species, is altering the behaviors and genetic profiles of some small wildcats, creating conservation dilemmas about how best to define and protect these species.
How do you make people care about protecting marine habitats and wildlife? You tell stories, says Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and founder of the Pristine Seas project at the National…
A thick-thumbed bat, a color-changing lizard, and a Muppet-looking orchid are just a few of the 380 new-to-science species found and described in the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia…