Cambodia lost more than half of its seasonally flooded grasslands in ten years due to industrial agricultural conversion, abandonment of traditional farming, and illegal drainage, putting several endangered bird species…
A family of capybaras (the world's largest rodent) in Bolivian wetlands. Photo by: Anouchka Unel. Bolivia continues to be a champion for Amazonian conservation. On February 2, 2013, Bolivia celebrated…
Annual deforestation emissions estimates released by the FAO Deforestation in Borneo. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched a global set of…
A cow stands in Brazil's Pantanal, the world's largest wetland which is threatened by cattle ranching and agriculture. In 2006 it was announced that 17 percent of the Pantanal had…
Mangroves in Panama Degradation and destruction of the world's seagrasses, tidal marshes, and mangroves may generate up to a billion tons in carbon dioxide emissions annually, reports a new study…
Click image to enlarge Flooded grasslands and savannas in Latin America are disappearing nearly three times faster than tropical rainforests in the region, finds a new study published in the…
Jaguar in the Brazilian Pantanal. Live jaguars can be worth considerably more for ecotourism than they livestock they kill, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the…
Map of extent of global wetlands. Courtesy of Prigent et al 2012. Click image to enlarge. Global wetlands declined by six percent between 1993 and 2007 due to conversion for…
The vast peatlands of Borneo are being destroyed at record rates, leading to among other impacts vast carbon emissions. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Forget the groundhogs, February 2nd is…
An American alligator and a Burmese python struggle in Everglades National Park. Photo by: Lori Oberhofer, U.S. National Park Service. The Everglades in southern Florida has faced myriad environmental impacts…
Even after 100 years have passed a restored wetland may not reach the state of its former glory. A new study in the open access journal PLoS Biology finds that…
An American alligator and a Burmese python struggle in Everglades National Park. Photo by: Lori Oberhofer, U.S. National Park Service. Last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced…
Aerial view over Latvian forests—please note almost all cutting patches are fresh, not yet regenerated. Photo by: R.Matrozis, 2007. The economic crisis has pushed many nations to scramble for revenue…
Páramo: Paisaje estudiado, habitado, manejado e institucionalizado á Pramo - an Ecuador overview Páramos © Robert Hofstede. Grupo de Trabajo en Páramos del Ecuador (GTP) is a remarkable self-organized group…
The common hippo (this one in Botswana) is considered Vulnerable to extinction. Photo by: Tiffany Roufs. It may appear unintuitive that special toilets could benefit hippos and other wetland species,…
A new monkey, dubbed the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri), was only discovered after researchers heard reports from hunters of a strange monkey with upturned nostrils and prominent lips in…
One of the world's top 25 most endangered primates: the roloway monkey (Cercopithecus diana roloway) photographed in the Munich Zoo. Saved from being converted into a vast palm oil plantation…
The Hula painted frog (Discoglossus nigriventer) was last seen in 1955. Photo by Professor Heinrich Mendelssohn/Conservation International. After its marshland was drained, researchers thought the Hula painted frog (Discoglossus nigriventer)…
Richard Blaustein is a freelance environmental journalist writing primarily on climate change, biodiversity, and genetic resource issues. He has written articles for BioScience, World Watch and Ecosystem Marketplace, and other…
Valuing Ecosystem Services: The Case of Multi-functional Wetlands provides the clearest guide yet to describing and implementing in a systematic fashion payments for ecosystems services (PES) strategies for wetland protection…
Despite decades of conservation work, populations of North America's smallest turtle, the bog turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii), is continuing to decline. Habitat destruction, invasive plants, road-kill, and the illegal pet trade…
Google Earth view of location of Little Buffalo, Alberta near site of oil spill. Yellow line is the Canadian border with the US. The Canadian province of Alberta has suffered…
Saiga calves. Photo by: Igor Shpilenok. Imagine visiting a region that is largely void of tourists, yet has world-class bird watching, a unique Buddhist population, and one of the world's…
Thousands of lesser flamingoes (Phoenicopterus minor) crowd in Lake Bogoria in Kenya. Nearly all of these flamingoes will breed in Tanzania's Lake Natron, now a proposed site for soda ash…
New study shows how greater biodiversity more efficiently scrubs pollutants from freshwater. A new landmark study not only proves that adding more species to a freshwater stream linearly increases the…
Continuous versus rotational grazing. Photo courtesy of: Eaton, D. P., Santos, S. A., Santos, M. C. A., Lima, J. V. B. and Keuroghlian, A. 2011. Rotational Grazing of Native Pasturelands…
As the world's largest migration in the Serengeti plains—including two million wildebeest, zebra, and Thomson's gazelles—has come under unprecedented threat due to plans for a road that would sever the…
Oil palm plantations, peatland, and forest in Sarawak. Courtsy of Google Earth. Peatlands and rainforests in Malaysia's Sarawak state on the island of Borneo are being rapidly destroyed for oil…
Dams, agricultural runoff, pesticides, sewage, mercury pollution from coal plants, invasive species, overconsumption, irrigation, erosion from deforestation, wetland destruction, overfishing, aquaculture: it's clear that the world's rivers are facing a…
Wetlands used for crops have expanded significantly over the past eighty years. According to a new study in the open-access journal Tropical Conservation Science, wetlands being utilized for crop production…