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

When researchers began cataloging dragonflies in Guainía, a remote region in eastern Colombia, the scientific record contained only about 10 species. By working with Indigenous communities, they’ve found nearly 120.

“When we started, very little was known,” Yiselle Cano, biodiversity leader of the Dragones Guainía project, told contributor Manuel Fonseca for Mongabay.

“I think we must be close to 120 species by now,” Cano said. “It’s a hugely diverse group, because it includes dragonflies native to the Orinoco, Amazonas, and dragonflies that are endemic to the Guiana Shield.”

The diversity makes Guainía a hotspot for dragonflies and damselflies. It may also provide insights on what is happening to the region’s water. These insects depend on healthy freshwater ecosystems, and their aquatic habitats are coming under growing pressure from mining, deforestation, poorly managed waste, and rapidly expanding tourism.

Cataloging the insects was only part of the work. Once the researchers had begun filling gaps in the scientific record, they held workshops to share their findings with local communities. There they encountered another gap: the language of biology meant little to people whose understanding of the landscape had been formed outside scientific taxonomies. Some participants didn’t speak Spanish at all.

Community leaders invited everyone, from young children to elders who retained ancestral knowledge. As researchers displayed the dragonflies found around puddles, streams, and rivers, participants tried to identify them in their own languages.

“This is something that sometimes leaves us speechless,” Delio Suárez, a Tucano Indigenous leader of the multiethnic community La Ceiba, told Mongabay. “This leaves us with the task of recovering their names, of looking back and asking the last remaining wisdom keepers that we have.”

Sometimes the words could be recovered. Sometimes they had to be invented. In the community of Remanso, members of the Puinave tribe created names in an ancestral language that is itself at risk of disappearing. Tucano and Curripaco communities have also begun naming the insects while working to recover their languages.

Communities are now developing their own means of monitoring dragonflies and, through them, the condition of the water on which they depend.

Read the full story by Manuel Fonseca here.

Banner image: Guainía, also known as the land of many waters, is a remote biodiversity hotspot at the meeting point of the Amazon Rainforest, the Orinoco River Basin, and the Guyana Shield. Image courtesy of Jenilee Montes.

Three male African wild dogs in Zambia have travelled more than 4,000 kilometers, about 2,500 miles, in search of new territory and mates, according to a new study. This nine-month odyssey, about half the distance between Cairo and Cape Town, reveals how these endangered animals connect populations and ecosystems that are far apart within Southern Africa and potentially beyond, researchers say.

“It’s the longest African mammal movement on record, and the longest [recorded] wild dog dispersal,” study co-author Matt Becker, chief executive of the Zambian Carnivore Programme, told Mongabay.

The trio of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), litter mates known as the Mayukuyuku males, left their birth pack in Kafue National Park in mid-2025. They travelled east out of the park, then north toward the industrial cities of Kitwe and Ndola, then doubled back before heading east toward the Luangwa River Valley and its 400-or-so-strong wild dog population.

By April 2026, the pack had traversed 4,126 km (2,564 mi) to reach a game management area (GMA), a partially protected buffer zone, between the national parks of South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi.

“We think they’ve actually established a [territorial] range, but we haven’t quantified who they’re with and how many dogs there are,” Becker said.

The Mayukuyuku males were among 19 wild dog groups the team tracked using GPS collars fitted to individuals. Some journeys ended in tragedy.

A female wild dog, nicknamed EWD-1355, set off with her two sisters from a pack in South Luangwa in 2021. After travelling more than 2,300 km (1,400 mi), including through Mozambique, EWD-1355 was killed in a hunter’s snare set in a GMA in southern Zambia to catch animals like antelope for meat.

It’s unclear what happened to her sisters, but snares are often laid in sets, Becker said. Dogs are reluctant to leave injured pack mates, and several can be trapped and killed in a single event, he added.

All 19 tracked groups moved within or around seven national parks in Zambia. Four groups separately reached within a few kilometers of neighboring Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

Researchers previously recorded similar wild dog migrations in Botswana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, suggesting most wild dog populations in Southern and Eastern Africa remain connected, the authors write.

“If we conserve and continue to improve these connections, a lot of species like wild dogs can make the rest happen,” Nyambe Nyambe, executive director of the secretariat governing the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, who wasn’t involved in the study, said in a statement.

With much of the landscapes where wild dogs live and disperse changing, Becker called for improved conservation models, such as ones that provide economic benefits through nature-based tourism or that produce meat sustainably and legally through game ranching.

“We don’t need to separate people from nature,” he said. “We can have these large landscapes, large, connected areas, beneficial to both.”

Banner image: A pack of endangered African wild dogs moving along a small dirt track in Kafue National Park., Zambia. Image courtesy of Scott Creel.

More than 500 people have invaded Brazil’s Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Land in recent weeks, opening illegal roads, setting deliberate fires and threatening federal agents. The area is home to the Igarapé Ipiaçava Indigenous people who live in voluntary isolation with no contact with outsiders.

On Aug. 26, a federal court ordered the government to deploy the National Public Security Force within 48 hours to contain the invasion. As of Sept 11, the forces hadn’t yet arrived.

The recent invasion followed the creation of the Bacajaí Environmental Protection Area (APA Bacajaí) under a new state law, which allows private landowners to build homes and raise livestock. However, APA Bacajaí completely overlaps the federally protected Indigenous land in Pará state, creating legal confusion that authorities say has been weaponized by land-grabbers to justify occupation for cattle ranching and other agricultural activities.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) has asked a federal court to fine the government 50,000 Brazilian reais (about $9,000) daily for failing to deploy enough security forces to contain the invasion. The area is currently under a temporary land-use restriction order to protect the isolated people living there.

The government has argued it needs authorization from Pará’s government, which hasn’t cooperated. However, federal prosecutors say the federal government can be deployed on federal land without state authorization.

Both the federal government and the state of Pará did not reply to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

In its press statement, the MPF said the Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) and Federal Police overflights have detected the use of heavy machinery and chainsaws to clear more than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) of forest trails and clandestine roads to mark illegal plots in the Indigenous land. It also said fires were started shortly after inspections, in what the MPF described as “clear retaliation and an attempt at intimidation.”

“What worries us most right now is the fire situation,” Helena Palmquist, deputy coordinator of the Observatory of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI), who has been monitoring the situation via satellite imagery and field reports, told Mongabay over WhatsApp voice messages. “We are experiencing an Amazonian dry season with the prospect of an El Niño event far more severe than previous ones; this makes the forest more volatile and prone to catching fire.”

Evidence attached to the MPF’s case file includes audio recordings that circulated among invaders, in which a man rallies around 100-200 people to surround the Funai team, burn their vehicles and force them out on foot. Officials also found a state government cargo vehicle being used to support the illegal settlement’s infrastructure during inspection activities, the MPF statement said.

Palmquist told Mongabay that after IBAMA, Brazil’s environment agency, carried out inspections and destroyed some machinery and trucks the week of Aug. 31, invaders set fire to the forest.

Banner image: Cattle graze in a deforested area near Novo Progresso in the state of Para, Brazil. Image by Andre Penner/AP Photo.

Several years of severe drought are forcing people to leave their homes in Angola to search for water and food in neighboring Namibia.

“There is real hunger and thirst here; that’s why the village has become depopulated,” Nghikembua (not his real name), who lives in Cunene Province in southern Angola, told Amnesty International in 2021. Nghikembua said nearly all the able-bodied people of his village have left, leaving behind only the elderly, like himself, “Those who still had some strength left felt forced to leave the village for Namibia.”

More than 1.8 million people live in Cunene and nearly 75% of the population is rural and depends on pastoralism and subsistence farming.

“Southern Angola has experienced repeated severe droughts, extreme heat and environmental degradation for quite a number of years, leaving families without water, crops, or livestock,” said Victor Nyamori, an Amnesty International researcher and migration lawyer who collected the testimonies for the recently published report featuring Nghikembua.

Approximately 30% of the area has been degraded by desertification, according to the Amnesty International report, leaving many subsistence communities without livelihoods.

“Namibia has also suffered from drought, but the state has responded much better and has put solutions in place to prevent the population from falling into food insecurity and to ensure access to water,” Nyamori told Mongabay in a phone call.

Between 2023 and 2024, a strong El Niño event brought the most severe drought in more than a century to the region. Namibia responded to the drought by expanding food and water assistance, supporting livestock owners and investing in social protection.

“Angola did not respond as well, which means that for Angolans, crossing the border has become a matter of survival,” Nyamori said. “For Angolans, displacement also means living in extremely scarce and sometimes dangerous conditions. For women and children, this means risking sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking.”

Historically, seasonal mobility formed an important part of social, economic and customary life in the region, enabling communities to access grazing land and water during droughts. But when colonization and arbitrary borders separated communities, such migration disappeared, Nyamori said.

“The border is the Cunene River,” he said. “On both sides, people speak the same language, have the same way of life, and are sometimes members of the same family. During the pre-colonial era, these communities crossed the river during periods of drought to find water.

“Perhaps, when responding to droughts, states should take this Indigenous knowledge into account, as it once helped prevent food crises, and allow these population movements to take place safely.”

For now, there is a bilateral agreement allowing Angolans to move freely in Namibia within 60 km (37 miles) of the border. Amnesty International is calling for Namibia to make its bilateral border agreement more permanent, particularly as climate scientists warn that a “supersized” El Niño is developing and will likely bring more devastating drought to the region.

Banner image: The Cunene River that divides Angola, left, and Namibia, right. Image © Amnesty International.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the Energy Department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old J.H. Campbell plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region and used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states — Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota — went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the states and the groups, saying there was no real emergency under the law.

The section of the Federal Power Act that allows emergency orders “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop,” Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.

By reversing the Campbell plant’s “long and carefully planned retirement … the results are disruptive,” Pillard wrote. There was “no ‘emergency’ within the meaning” of the statute, she added.

The Michigan case is one several legal disputes that have emerged across the country as the Trump administration uses emergency powers to force a half-dozen coal-fired plants from closing. The orders are raising ratepayer bills, critics say, and adding air and water pollution that could otherwise have been avoided.

Keeping the Michigan plant open cost at least $135 million in 2025 alone, officials said.

Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the court ruling rejected the Trump administration’s nationwide effort to force “unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.”

The Energy Department’s “unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” Kelly said Friday. The Campbell plant and other aging sites are “incredibly expensive, dangerous to our health and break down frequently,” he said.

The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Matthew Daly, Associated Press

Banner image: J.H. Campbell, a coal-burning power plant, operates in West Olive, Mich., Tuesday, May 19, 2026. Julián Trejo Bax, Associated Press

Mozambique has formally protected Mount Mabu, a hotspot of endemic wildlife and home to more than 200 species of butterflies, located in the Lugela district of northern Mozambique.

The decree, published on Aug. 24 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries, created the 9,341-hectare (23,082-acre) Mount Mabu Community Conservation Area, with stewardship of the land granted to the local communities that have preserved the forest for generations.

“It’s a great relief,” Julian Bayliss, an ecologist who led several surveys over 20 years that helped build the case for protecting Mount Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “These forests are very important because they’ve got high levels of endemism.”

Every year in October and November, hundreds of butterflies gather in the morning on the 1,700-meter (5,577-foot) summit of Mount Mabu, a mating behavior scientists call hilltopping. In 2013, the phenomenon was documented by naturalist David Attenborough who lent Mount Mabu the nickname “butterfly forest.”

Scientists have recorded more than 200 butterfly taxa at Mabu but say the real number could reach 250 with further surveys. Since 2005, more than 30 species, including frogs, chameleons, bats and insects, have been discovered in the forests of Mabu.

Bayliss and colleagues most recently described a new-to-science cobalt-blue butterfly, Iolaus mabuensis, found by a research team he led in Mabu in 2008. Only one specimen of the species has been collected to date, Bayliss said.

Bayliss was also the first scientist to encounter the Mount Mabu forest viper, Atheris mabuensis, described in 2009, after he accidentally stepped on one under a pile of leaf litter.

According to the decree, the land is dedicated to the protection, conservation and sustainable use of natural resources by local communities. Any specific restrictions on activities are expected to be defined under the community management plan that has not yet been finalized.

Mount Mabu hosts “the largest continuous block” of medium-altitude forest left in southern Africa. The terrain has steep ridges and valleys, which create microclimates and isolated flora and fauna that evolved over millions of years into a plethora of species found in few other places, and in some cases nowhere else in the world, Bayliss said.

Today, the forest’s main threats are from encroachment of small-scale agriculture and logging, but overall, the area is well-conserved and treated as sacred by locals, according to the 2024 conservation area proposal reviewed by Mongabay.

“All of this effort is a recognition of the community that protected the forest,” José Monteiro, executive director of ReGeCom, one of the organizations working with the local communities at Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “The community, over a long time, kept the forest standing.”

Banner image: Butterflies on Mount Mabu. Image courtesy of Julian Bayliss.