On Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island, in the South Pacific, a tree juts out precariously from the side of a steep cliff. It’s the last known wild individual of Dendroseris neriifolia. To prevent its total extinction in the wild, conservationists recently collected seeds from the tree and have begun trials to cultivate them.

All 11 species of the genus Dendroseris are exclusive to the Juan Fernández Archipelago off Chile. The trees, with striking yellow, orange or white flowers, have been nearly wiped out by extensive habitat degradation, invasive plants, and damage by introduced mammals such as goats and rodents.

Only one known wild individual of the critically endangered D. neriifolia remains on Robinson Crusoe, one of the three main islands in the archipelago, according to Paulina Hechenleitner, research associate at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K.

This tree, estimated to be around 150 years old, hangs off a remote cliff that “is extremely difficult to access, requiring specialist fieldwork and careful planning to avoid any harm,” she told Mongabay by email.

Every year, local conservationists attempt to collect seeds from the tree’s one-seeded fruits. However, fruiting is irregular and some seasons the fruits produce few or no viable seeds, Hechenleitner said.

This year, conservationists collected about 400 seeds, of which 29 were considered potentially viable and sent to the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Kew, the world’s largest wild plant seed conservation program. There, researchers used X-ray imaging to confirm that 24 seeds showed the presence of embryo development.

These 24 “good seeds” were split into three groups of eight, said Alice Hudson, MSB partnership officer at Kew.  “An initial eight were trialled for germination to see if we had the conditions right,” Hudson told Mongabay by email. “Now we know that the methodology works we plan to germinate another 8 of the seeds. The final 8 will be banked at the MSB for long-term conservation.”

The seedlings will be shared with U.K. botanical gardens to refine and improve cultivation and propagation methods under different growing conditions, Hechenleitner said. “Increasing seed production is key to strengthening seed bank collections and generating material that can eventually be repatriated to Chile for habitat restoration. Continued seed collection from the last wild tree, whenever viable crops are produced, will help secure remaining genetic diversity.”

The ultimate goal of the project is to restore wild populations of the tree. But “this will require long-term investment in habitat restoration, invasive species control, monitoring, and carefully planned reintroductions,” Hechenleitner said.

Survival of Dendroseris trees is crucial for species that depend on them, including the critically endangered Juan Fernández firecrown (Sephanoides fernandensis), a hummingbird that forages on nectar produced by the trees’ flowers.

“This genus [Dendroseris] only occurs on the Juan Fernández Islands, if they’re lost that’s a whole group of species gone with unique diversity,” Hudson said.

Banner image of the last known wild individual of Dendroseris neriifolia, courtesy of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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

Mohammed Abu Daya is a marine ecologist from Gaza. His work focuses on spinetail devil rays, also known as giant devil rays, a critically endangered species that moves through the Mediterranean and beyond. Few scientists specialize in these animals. Fewer still have studied them from Gaza, where local waters form part of their range.

Before the war, Abu Daya taught at Palestinian universities and worked from Gaza’s National Research Center. He went to sea with fishers, measured spinetail devil rays (Mobula mobular) brought ashore, monitored markets, and gathered data on a species more often studied from the western Mediterranean. His work helped place Gaza within the known range of the threatened migratory animal, reports contributor Lyse Mauvais for Mongabay.

The pressures on Gaza’s sea were already severe. Israeli restrictions limited where fishers could work. Fish stocks had declined. Poverty and fuel costs pushed people toward whatever could be caught close to shore. In 2013, when a large group of devil rays came near Gaza’s coast, fishers landed several hundred of them. Abu Daya did not treat the event only as a conservation failure. He tried to understand what had led to it, including the lack of local conservation systems and the strain on people living with few choices.

Then came the current war. Abu Daya lost his home, his office, and regular access to the sea. Universities, libraries, fishing boats, landing sites, and port infrastructure have been destroyed. He has been displaced several times and now lives, like many in Gaza, with limited access to food, clean water, electricity, and the internet.

He has continued to work.

In 2025, during the war, Abu Daya co-authored a study on spinetail devil ray movement across the Mediterranean. One ray he had personally tagged off Gaza with the help of local fishermen traveled to Spain and later returned to the Levantine Sea. The finding helped show that these animals make long, repeated migrations, and that eastern Mediterranean waters are important to their survival.

His persistence is difficult to absorb. A scientist cut off from his laboratory, his students, and the sea keeps analyzing data from a tent. He joins conferences remotely when he can. He collaborates with colleagues abroad. He works on manuscripts while daily life is reduced to securing water and food.

The war has also damaged the conditions that make science possible. It has destroyed institutions, field sites, records, equipment, and classrooms. It has interrupted the lives of people whose knowledge may never be rebuilt in the same form. Conservation depends on those people: the local scientists who know the coast, the fishers who remember what came ashore, and the students who might have carried the work forward.

Read the full interview with Mohammed Abu Daya here.

Banner image: Mohammed Abu Daya, right, collects data on a spinetail devil ray in Gaza in 2015. Image courtesy of Mohammed Abu Daya and Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a critical role in the fight to secure title to ancestral Indigenous lands in the Amazon. They can provide financial assistance and legal representation in court, but new research shows that for groups that do not benefit from this support, the arrival of NGOs may cause more harm than good.

A recent paper, published in Political Geography, highlights how this dynamic has played out in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. There, with the backing of the NGO Amazon Frontlines, the Siekopai community of San Pablo de Katëtsiaya won title to 42,360 hectares (104,674 acres) of their ancestral land. However, the area had long been occupied by another Indigenous group, the Kichwa community of Zancudo Cocha, or Zancudo, which also had deep cultural and spiritual ties to the land but was not included in Amazon Frontline’s efforts.

Such unequal support is termed “uneven territorial sponsorship” by the study authors. It can come from third parties including NGOs, states, religious organizations and others when they support one community at the disadvantage of another that may have a similar ancestral claim to the land. In Ecuador, it has led to tensions between the two communities, with reported incidents of violence and a lack of compromise.

Amazon Frontlines helped the Siekopai secure title to the territory by framing their claim in a more non-Indigenous, Western, legal tradition, which defines territory as sovereign, sacred and timeless, according to the paper. Historically, before the mid-20th century, Amazonian communities saw territorial claims as more fluid; co-occupation is common as families relocate periodically due to conflicts or pandemics.

Mitch Anderson, the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, told Mongabay in a statement that tension in the region was not due to the NGO’s involvement but because of the “Ecuadorian Government’s reckless approach to the creation of ‘protected areas’ that overlap Indigenous ancestral lands, and the doling out of ‘use and access’ agreements to diverse Indigenous communities without sufficient consideration to the historical and cultural connections to the land.”

Mongabay covered the case in a four-part series.

“I think one key lesson for NGOs working in the Amazon (and donors and beneficiaries) is that legal rulings to resolve territorial disputes may not have any real effect if they lack legitimacy on the ground or among the interested parties,” co-author of the paper Angus Lyall, a geographer at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, told Mongabay via WhatsApp messages. “In addition, trials can even make those disputes more contentious and more difficult to resolve.”

Lyall said that “although mediation can be long, frustrating, and unproductive, an overarching principle to consider is that NGOs avoid worsening divisions between communities or nationalities, particularly as they confront shared challenges and threats.”

Banner image: Members of Siekopai communities gather together to talk about gaining the land, known as Pë’këya. Image by Amazon Frontlines.

MALINDI, Kenya (AP) — Across East Africa’s coastline, climate change and industrial fishing are threatening the livelihoods of millions who depend on the ocean. In Kenya, women are turning to community tourism, mangrove restoration and other nature-based enterprises as declining fish stocks force them to adapt. Their experiences mirror a regional push to strengthen coastal resilience through sustainable livelihoods and marine conservation, as governments and environmental groups call for stronger action to protect fisheries, curb illegal fishing and safeguard the future of the region’s oceans. Conservation groups also are urging African governments to ratify a landmark U.N. pact establishing marine protected areas in international waters and fair sharing of marine resources.

By Allan Olingo, Associated Press

Banner image: An unfinished restaurant under construction by a women’s group led by Nuru Mohammed is seen in Sabaki, Malindi, Kenya, on June 15, 2026. Allan Olingo, Associated Press. 

Brazil has increased wildfire spending and has hired a record number of federal firefighters in anticipation of extreme drought in the Amazon due to what could be one of the strongest El Niño events in more than a century.

The El Niño climate pattern, which emerges from unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific, typically brings hotter, drier conditions to large parts of the Amazon. This raises the risk of severe drought and large wildfires. With a ‘strong’ to ‘very strong’ El Niño predicted this year, the impacts on the world’s largest rainforest are also expected to be more extreme.

“I’m not calm. I’m very alert,” João Paulo Sotero, director of deforestation and fire policy at Brazil’s environment ministry, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We are much better prepared [now] than we were in 2024 and 2025 … we are prepared for the worst scenario.”

Sotero said Brazil has increased funding for fire management in 2026 to 1.023 billion reais ($197 million), up 28% from 2025, or 24% after adjusting for inflation, rising after pro–deforestation president Jair Bolsonaro left office at the end of 2022. The budget is now five times larger than it was in 2019.

The environment ministry also hired 4,410 additional federal firefighters for the 2026 fire season. In 2024, 3,224 firefighters were hired, while 4,358 firefighters were hired in 2025.

According to Sotero, his team has identified high-risk locations in the Amazon to focus efforts, including a new deforestation frontier in the south of Amazon state, and around the Gurupi Biological Reserve in Maranhão state. He said they have also increased the number of water-bearing planes and helicopters available for firefighting.

The 2023-24 El Niño event pushed several Amazonian rivers to an all-time low level, killing dolphins and cutting off communities that depend on river traffic. It also fueled 2024’s worst Amazon fire season in 20 years.

A stronger El Niño could bring a similarly severe, or worse, drought, with the most intense effects expected between September and January, said Carlos Nobre, the climate scientist behind the Amazon tipping point theory.

“We have to fight the fires,” Nobre told Mongabay by phone, adding that 98% of fires in the Amazon are set by humans, not electrical discharges from lightning or power lines. “The risk posed by fires is so great today that we should have policies prohibiting, for example, the financial system from financing agricultural operations that use fire.”

Brazil’s Environment Ministry said it has discussed financial incentives to link access to agricultural finance to the non-use of fire, but no such measures have been adopted. Officials also said that fire restrictions during El Niño will be up to individual states, adding that firefighters use controlled burns to reduce wildfire risks.

Banner image: Residents fight a forest fire in Acre, Brazil in September 2025. Image courtesy of Victor Moriyama/Climate Visuals.

Two king vultures (Sarcoramphus papa), one of the largest vulture species in the Americas, perch on a tree branch in Costa Rica. One leans over to nibble the other.

The king vulture’s range stretches from Mexico south through the Amazon Rainforest and down to northern Argentina. These birds have a wingspan of up to 2 meters (6.6 feet), white plumage with black wingtips, and a remarkably colorful head with orange, yellow, red and purple hues.

The species is featured symbolically in ancient Maya carvings, manuscripts and painted ceramics that date back millennia. More recently in the Amazon, historians detailed Indigenous oral traditions that feature king vultures as a master of fire.

Peter Hudson, a professor of biology at Penn State University, U.S., captured the photo above in April 2026. “They really look very, very prehistoric,” he told Mongabay by phone. “They’re beautiful birds, absolutely stunning.”

In Costa Rica, ecotourism has helped garner support for the conservation of vultures and other species, Hudson said. In the areas surrounding national parks and public nature reserves, private landowners are becoming more interested in conservation and offering tourists hides from which they can observe wildlife.

It was from one of these hideouts on private land that Hudson spotted and photographed the king vultures. In total, he spotted six vultures, one which he suspects was a juvenile.

“[The owner of the hideout] was going ecstatic when one of them was leaning over to sort of nibble at the other one,” Hudson said, describing the moment he photographed. “There was really some nice intimacy between [the vultures].

“We’re seeing this more and more, where people are setting up private reserves around recognized reserves and national parks and being able to either have camps there or put up hides,” he added. “And that’s really good because it extends the extent of the park.”

Banner image: King vultures in Costa Rica. Images courtesy of Peter Hudson.