In Suriname, a South American country where sloths find their homes, deforestation poses a great challenge. These slow-moving creatures, unlike birds, cannot fly away, nor can they run quickly to…
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
Harvard-trained ethnobotanist and host of the popular podcast Plants of the Gods, Mark Plotkin is no stranger to psychedelic plants. But many people across the world, particularly in countries where…
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…
Urban green spaces — parks, gardens and other green areas where people can go to enjoy some fresh air — are more than just pretty places to relax. New research…
Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…
The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…
Today, Mongabay launches a digital version of the book, A Perfect Storm in the Amazon, by Timothy J. Killeen, an academic and expert who, since the 1980s, has studied the…
Scientists say they have solved the mystery behind the periodic disappearance and reappearance of the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) across huge areas of central and South America. A new study…
Deforestation is pushing the Amazon rainforest dangerously close to its tipping point, and the effects could soon be felt across the globe. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund…
Scientists warn that the Amazon is hurtling toward a tipping point, beyond which it would begin to transition from lush tropical forest into a dry, degraded savanna, unable to support…
Funding for the research and writing of this series of articles was provided by Amazon Aid Foundation. “We’ve been fighting the government of Suriname for almost 25 years, for recognition…
In the world’s largest rainforest, wildlife crawls, hops, flies and prowls through every nook and cranny. Most animals are adept at hiding from humans, though, so finding them can be…
As a best-selling author, the co-founder of the award-winning Amazon Conservation Team, and an acclaimed public speaker, Mark Plotkin is one of the world’s most prominent rainforest ethnobotanists and conservationists.…
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…
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…
In mid-June 2012, a few months after she started monitoring the jaguars inside Brownsberg Nature Park in Suriname, biologist Vanessa Kadosoe saw Amalia for the first time. Through the pictures…
A dramatic surge in jaguar poaching and confiscations could be linked to Chinese-led investment in Latin America, poverty and corruption, according to a new study.
Starting October 6, the Catholic Church will hold its first ever synod focused on an ecological biome. Bishops, indigenous leaders and activists will meet and set plans to help save the Amazon.
There are now three recognized species of electric eel after two new species were described to science in a paper published in Nature Communications this week. One of the new…
Among the fisheries of Latin America and the Caribbean, shrimp has the highest export value after tuna. Trawling, the most popular and efficient way to harvest shrimp, has been a…
Suriname is a country few people have heard of, let alone visited. Located in the northeast corner of South America, Suriname is almost completely covered in rainforest. It has the…
The largest carnivorous mammal of tropical America – the King of Beasts of the Amazon rainforest – is the jaguar. Found from the deserts of the American southwest as far…