Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

For the first time in the modern history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a local nongovernmental organization will co-manage a protected area in the country with its wildlife authority, reports Mongabay’s Elodie Toto.

Strong Roots Congo will co-manage Itombwe Nature Reserve in South Kivu province with the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) under a public-private partnership.

“It is an honor,” Dominique Bikaba, founder of Strong Roots Congo, told Toto. “I think the government chose us because they have observed the work we have done in the biodiversity corridor and the way we have put local communities at the center of conservation.”

Strong Roots has secured nearly 600,000 hectares (roughly 1.5 million acres) of community land to create a corridor between Kahuzi-Biega National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve. It aims to secure 1 million hectares (about 2.5 million acres).

The development comes three months after the DRC adopted a National Forest Policy that recognizes the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to manage forest areas. The measures are significant because many protected areas in the country were created through the eviction of Indigenous populations, exacerbating conflict between local communities and park authorities.

Read the full story by Elodie Toto here.

Banner image: Critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas live in Itombwe Nature Reserve. Image courtesy of Strong Roots Congo.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

In Clayoquot Sound, in the Canadian province of British Columbia, a partnership between the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, the Redd Fish Restoration Society, and West Coast Kelp is helping rebuild degraded kelp forests, reports contributor Jennifer Cole for Mongabay.

The initiative, launched in early 2026, has established a nursery to grow young bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) and giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) beyond the reach of grazers such as sea urchins. Sections are then harvested and transplanted to sites around Clayoquot Sound.

So far, the area replanted is small — 4,200 square meters (45,208 square feet), or the size of about 10 basketball courts — but the project may help show how kelp forests can be restored more effectively.

“We know that kelp creates habitat, but we don’t have numbers to associate with that, and we want to be able to determine the actual benefit,” Emily Fulton, the marine program manager for the Redd Fish Restoration Society, told Mongabay.

Fulton said traditional knowledge preserved in Tla-o-qui-aht oral history has helped the project identify where to plant.

“My ancestors had a system of reciprocity where they knew not to take too much, and we were always giving back,” said Tatt Charlie, a tribal guardian of the Tla-o-qui-aht. “So, to have that balance is what we’re trying to achieve with our territories. It’s really interesting to see that these are the baby steps we need to take to set it back to pre-contact 300 years ago.”

For now, the nursery offers a small test of whether restoration can help return an old relationship between people, kelp, and the coast. 

Read the full story by Jennifer Cole here.

Banner image: Project team members prepare juvenile bull kelp for transplanting in Clayoquot Sound. Image courtesy of Graeme Owsianski/Redd Fish Restoration Society.

Zuzana Burivalova, a tropical forest ecologist who uses sound to understand the health of forests globally, was recently named the winner of the 2026 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. The award is an initiative of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

“Receiving this award feels really humbling, and also special, maybe particularly so during times that are challenging for work in environmental issues and conservation,” Burivalova told Mongabay by email. “I see getting an award like this to also mean taking the responsibility for doing as much as I can for biodiversity conservation in the years to come.”

An associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, U.S., and the principal investigator of the Sound Forest Lab, Burivalova has worked in forests across the world, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Peru, Madagascar, and Ecuador.

Within those forests, Burivalova and her colleagues have placed remote audio recorders, which allow them to listen to mammals, birds, amphibians, and insects, all day long, all year round. The sound data offer a baseline of what life currently sounds like inside those forests. They also provide valuable information to understand what’s changing over time.

Burivalova has collaborated with Mongabay on the Conservation Effectiveness platform that examines how well (or not) various conservation strategies work.

“It’s a huge encouragement to know that work on biodiversity conservation in tropical forests and beyond is seen as important,” Burivalova said. “It makes me feel proud of our lab.”

The Pritzker award includes $100,000 in prize money. Burivalova told Mongabay she hopes to use the money to scale up her Soundscape Baselines Project so that it can partner with more local scientists and communities in intact forest areas. “I would also like to build a portfolio of conservation projects that have used the soundscape baselines, to show how exactly they can be used.”

Finalists Doris Njagi and Suzanne Pierre received $15,000 each.

Njagi is the founder of Forest Restored, which works with tens of thousands of smallholder farmers to restore degraded land across East Africa by growing native trees.

Pierre is a microbial ecologist and founder of the Critical Ecology Lab, a U.S.-based nonprofit that investigates how human activities have affected ecological processes such as carbon and nitrogen cycling and relationships between plants and microbes.

Burivalova said she “felt incredibly honored” to stand on the podium together Njagi and Pierre, whom she called inspiring.

Banner image: Zuzana Burivalova recording in Bavaria. Image courtesy of Tobias Corts.

Oil slicks from vessels and offshore oil operations repeatedly drifted into marine protected areas around the world between 2022 and 2025, a new analysis has found. The report raises concerns for important habitats for a variety of marine life, including whales, dolphins, and sea turtles.

Researchers from SkyTruth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks oil pollution using satellite imagery, detected dozens of slicks covering hundreds of square kilometers in protected waters globally.

“We’re seeing persistent, repeated, chronic oil pollution in many parts of the ocean from shipping and offshore oil and gas operations,” SkyTruth CEO John Amos told Mongabay by phone. “Wind and current blow them around out in the ocean, so even if the pollution event that occurs is outside a marine protected area, that pollution could drift into the protected area.”

The worst oil pollution in an MPA was recorded along the Atlantic coast of the Republic of Congo’s Conkouati-Douli National Park. SkyTruth recorded 27 oil slicks covering 880 square kilometers (340 square miles) of the park’s waters. The slicks likely came from three offshore oil platforms located outside the marine park, according to the report. The area is home to sharks, rays, dolphins, whales, and manatees. Leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) sea turtles also nest there.

In the Mediterranean Sea, roughly 417 km2 (161 mi2) of oil slicks covered sections of two important marine protected areas. Spain’s Mediterranean Cetacean Migration Corridor registered 45 slicks, all from vessels, the report notes. The Pelagos Sanctuary for the Conservation of Marine Mammals, a reserve shared by France, Italy, and Monaco, registered another 26 slicks.

“It’s one thing to designate an area a marine protected area,” Amos said. “It’s another thing entirely to ensure that that area is well enough monitored and managed to ensure that pollution and other impacts are not negatively affecting the marine protected area.” 

Off Romania’s Black Sea coast, 67 slicks covered 263 km² (102 mi²) across two adjacent protected areas: the marine zone of the Danube Delta, and Zernov’s Phyllophora Field, named after a red seaweed that forms underwater meadows there.

According to the SkyTruth report, harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) live in that area of the Black Sea.  

“Fundamentally, oil is toxic to marine life,” Amos said.

Oil slicks can contain heavy metals and compounds that can kill or impair the development of organisms at the lowest levels of the food chain, including krill. These contaminants can then bioaccumulate up through the food chain to the largest animals in the sea.

“We’ve got plenty of research showing acute toxicity from exposure to a variety of chemicals in large doses,” Amos said. However, the impacts of chronic low-level exposure are less well understood. “It’s a lot harder to study that.”

Banner image: Oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Image courtesy of NOAA.

A recent study has proposed a road map for countries to better monitor wildlife health and disease outbreaks.

Previous research found that nearly 60% of the 107 countries it surveyed showed no evidence of a functional wildlife health surveillance system. This leaves ecosystems, agriculture, and human populations vulnerable to catastrophic outbreaks, the researchers say.

The blueprint presented in the latest study offers actionable solutions to improve surveillance, said study co-author Sarah Olson, director of health at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

“Earlier research did a good job diagnosing the problem in terms of what’s missing, and what wildlife health surveillance needs to deliver,” Olson told Mongabay by email. “This paper goes further: it uses a Theory of Change to map out how we actually close that gap, given limited resources and fragmented networks, to reach real collaborative surveillance. The challenge now is scaling efforts and expertise through a global community of practice — no single organization can meet this need alone, and the more we collaborate, the faster surveillance can grow everywhere.”

Olson and her colleagues write that unmonitored disease events have already inflicted severe ecological and economic damage; for instance, sheep and goat plague caused an estimated 80% decline in Mongolia’s endangered saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), while highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) continues to trigger mass mortality across populations of wild birds and marine mammals. Mongabay recently reported on the spread of H5N1 affecting wild birds, urban wildlife, and live animal markets across cities like New York. The researchers say that if lethal pathogens can spread unchecked in heavily monitored megacities, the risks are vastly magnified in regions lacking basic biosurveillance.

However, existing monitoring efforts remain plagued by sporadic, crisis-driven funding that evaporates as soon as emergencies subside, according to the researchers.

To overcome these systemic barriers, the study outlines a collaborative road map or “theory of change” designed by the Wildlife Health Intelligence Network (WHIN) to establish lasting, locally led surveillance programs. The road map identifies six pathways.

This includes shifting mindsets away from viewing wildlife merely as an economic liability; securing dedicated political support and funding; and adopting evidence-based practices. A fourth pathway includes deploying user-driven tools like the shared HAWK data platform, a service for managing wildlife health surveillance data. The other steps include strengthening frontline workforce skills, and mobilizing a global community of practice.

Rather than imposing top-down mandates, the road map advocates scaling up proven regional models, such as WildHealthNet in Southeast Asia, to integrate community monitoring directly into national legislation.

The authors noted that many of the recognized experts in this field are in high-income countries, creating a significant limitation in global representation. But Olson said the network is intentionally structured to reverse that imbalance, “by elevating local expertise from low- and middle-income countries along with Indigenous-led and community-led efforts.”

Banner image: Dead elephant seal pups on a beach in Argentine Patagonia. It’s unclear how they died. Image © Maxi Jonas via WCS.

A chance sighting of photos on Instagram, then a five-day expedition, including a last-minute, late-night detour in a Colombian rainforest — that’s what it took for researchers to confirm a new-to-science species of giant water lily. The plant has such large leaves the researchers could also spot it from space, according to a new study.

The saga started in 2021, when giant-water-lily expert Carlos Magdalena came across photos posted by Jeremiah Harris on Instagram. In the photos, Harris, who runs a carnivorous-plant nursery in the U.S., was swimming next to giant water lily leaves in Colombia’s Inírida River.

Harris had labelled the plant a wild individual of Victoria amazonica, but Magdalena knew that no known species of South American giant water lilies from the genus Victoria had previously been reported from the Orinoco Basin, of which the Inírida River is a tributary.

“So the moment I saw the picture on Instagram with a geolocation on Inírida I realized it was remarkable,” Magdalena, a botanical and scientific research horticulturist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K., told Mongabay by email.

Intrigued, Magdalena turned to satellite imagery. Giant water lilies have massive, circular leaves, more than 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter, and Magdalena spotted several Victoria floating pads in the Inírida and nearby lakes. This confirmed there were more Victoria water lilies in that river system.

Magdalena then formed a team with researchers, as well as with Nilo Rodríguez, Jaime Hernández, and Gustavo Melo, members of the Río Atabapo, Caranacoa-Yurí-Laguna Morocoto, and Puinave-Piapoco el Paujil Indigenous reserves.

Together, they set out on a five-day expedition into Inírida’s flooded rainforest. By the end of the expedition, they had located two plants, but those didn’t have flowers, which researchers need to identify species. It was only on their last night, with just 10 hours to go, that Melo guided them to a small lake deep in the rainforest, where they found a second population of Victoria plants, including one that was in flower.

The researchers eventually confirmed the giant water lilies in the Inírida were indeed new to science. They’ve named it Victoria colombiana. Its leaves can be up to 2 metres (6.6 feet) wide.

Magdalena said partnering with Rodríguez, Hernández, and Melo “was quintessential.”

“Their knowledge of the area is incredible, but also, they had legendary navigation skills in a rather thick flooded forest where GPS knowledge or mobile connectivity was simply not there,” he said. “To say that this research would have not been possible without their support and help, is an understatement.”

Magdalena added that Inírida’s giant water lily remained unknown to science despite its size because it’s “incredibly rare and grows in places that are not often visited by people, let alone science.”

The researchers estimate there may only be about 30-50 wild V. colombiana plants, making it critically endangered.

Magdalena said his team is trying to collect its seeds to propagate in botanic gardens and near the Indigenous communities.

Banner image: Carlos Magdalena with Victoria colombiana’s leaves. Image courtesy of Mauricio Bernal.