A powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on July 29 sent ripples nearly 4,000 miles across the Pacific, disturbing one of the most fragile ecosystems in the United States: Devils Hole in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, according to park officials.

The quake generated 10-inch waves inside the narrow, water-filled cavern—a dramatic but not unprecedented event for the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis), which rely on a shallow limestone shelf to spawn and feed. With only 38 fish counted during the March 2025 survey, any disturbance can have outsized consequences.

The July waves removed some sediment and algae from the shelf, but park officials say the damage was limited. “The waves generated by this earthquake were smaller than those from the previous quakes,” the National Park Service (NPS) noted in a recent release. “Conditions are favorable for algae regrowth.”

This cautious optimism comes after a brutal spring. A December 2024 earthquake off Humboldt County and a second in February 2025 each triggered sloshing waves that wiped out larvae, eggs, and algae in Devils Hole. Those events are believed to have caused the steep population drop from 191 pupfish in spring 2024—a 25-year high—to just 38 a year later.

In response, biologists from the NPS, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Nevada Department of Wildlife implemented emergency actions outlined in the 2022 Devils Hole Pupfish Strategic Plan. Nineteen captive-raised pupfish were reintroduced from a backup colony at the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility, likely preventing the population from dipping below the record low of 35 fish in 2013.

“This population is incredibly vulnerable,” said Michael Schwemm, senior fish biologist for USFWS. “The present size at near-record lows deserves our serious attention.”

Despite the setbacks, pupfish often increase their spawning after disturbances—a quirk that offers a sliver of hope. Biologists observed spawning behavior this spring, and sunlight during summer months is expected to stimulate algae recovery. Supplemental feedings continue to support the population during periods of low productivity.

For now, the fish persist. But long-term threats remain. The Devils Hole pupfish are confined to a rock shelf barely the size of a compact parking space. Climate change, groundwater depletion, and genetic bottlenecks further jeopardize their survival.

“The pupfish is an indicator of the health of the larger ecosystem,” said Kevin Wilson, an NPS ecologist. “By protecting this tiny fish, we’re protecting the aquifer and the entire web of life that depends on it.”

The next population count is scheduled for fall 2025. Conservationists hope it will bring better news.

Banner image: Devils Hole pupfish in the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility. Photo by Olin Feuerbacher/USFWS

Civil groups expressed dismay as the 30th International Seabed Authority (ISA) session recently ended in Jamaica without a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a process of extracting minerals from the seafloor, which experts say can damage marine ecosystems.

The ISA Council finished the second reading of the draft regulations for the commercial exploitation of deep-sea minerals. However, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin of the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that many parts of the text still require further negotiations.

The bulletin said some member states wanted to finalize regulations, claiming that delays create uncertainty amid possibilities of deep-sea mining outside the ISA framework, which The Metals Company (TMC) the U.S. government is reportedly attempting. Countries like Germany, Greece and Ireland say they want to first have a better scientific understanding of the risks of deep-sea mining, a general policy for marine environmental protection or a long-overdue periodic review to account for changes in ocean governance and trends.

Working groups will continue discussions on the draft mining code until the ISA’s next session in 2026.

“With dozens of unresolved issues in the International Seabed Authority’s draft deep-sea mining regulations, the ISA still has significant work ahead before any rules can be completed,” Julian Jackson, The Pew Charitable Trusts project director, said in an email to Mongabay.

Jackson said the ISA should listen to “a growing wave of governments, businesses, scientists, organizations, and communities worldwide urging a moratorium on seabed mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction until there is sufficient science to ensure the marine environment’s protection.”

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), which comprises more than 130 organizations and institutes, in a statement called on governments to “reflect on the political and moral costs of inaction and stand firm for a moratorium.” Among the 38 countries that support a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining are France, Brazil and Palau.

“We know that deep-sea mining will devastate life in the deep ocean, wipe out species before they have been discovered, and impact ocean functions, including carbon sequestration,” Farah Obaidullah, founder of the Netherlands-based The Ocean and Us, said in the statement.

In a separate statement, Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Juressa Lee called deep-sea mining “the latest form of colonisation and extraction.”

The DSCC said the ISA Assembly also failed to debate important issues such as the ocean’s role in climate regulation, the world’s limited knowledge on deep-sea ecosystems and whether minerals from the seabed really need to be mined.

The ISA Council has mandated an inquiry as TMC attempts to bypass the ISA and unilaterally mine in international waters. “Unless a moratorium is established, governments at the ISA could be sleepwalking into opening the door to one of the largest mining operations our planet has ever seen,” the DSCC said.

Banner image of a remotely operated vehicle KIEL 6000 holding a manganese nodule in the sought-after Clarion-Clipperton Zone by the ROV-Team/GEOMAR via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

In Indonesia’s Central Java province, two groups of Javan gibbons have become isolated in two small forest patches. To help the gibbons make their way to larger forest areas, a local NGO, SwaraOwa, is working with farmers in the region to restore and build “corridors” that would connect the fragmented forest blocks, Mongabay reported in a video published in June.

Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch), known locally as owa, are only found on the island of Java and are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. Only 4,000 individuals are thought to remain in the wild, with many confined to increasingly fragmented forest patches due to logging, agriculture and infrastructure.

Two such Javan gibbon groups, one with five members and the other with four, live in two tiny forest patches isolated from a larger forest area by farms and settlements. The gibbons have little canopy cover to move between the forests.

“From about 2000 until the end of 2010, hunting of primates was still massive, especially gibbons and langurs. Sometimes people hunted them to sell their meat, sometimes to sell their offspring,” Alex Rifai, a farmer from Mendolo village, said in the video.

But then SwaraOwa (“Sound of the owa” in Indonesian) started educating farmers about the biodiversity treasure on their doorstep: that the Javan gibbon is one of five primate species on the island that’s found nowhere else on Earth. “That was a point of pride for us, we were like, ‘Wow, we have to protect them,’” Rifai recalled.

SwaraOwa reforestation coordinator Sidiq Harjanto said they drew up a map showing how the forest blocks where the two gibbon groups lived were no longer connected to the larger nearby forest. “That is actually a pretty critical condition,” he said.

After realizing the dire state of the gibbons, the NGO and farmers launched a community-based conservation scheme.

“Some of the village youths were also recently concerned about the decline in quality of the forest, so we carried out tree planting,” Harjanto said.

In 2023, young farmers from Mendolo started cultivating native pucung (Pangium edule) and timber trees in a nursery, which they then planted in the Mendolo village forest. By 2024, the group had planted 500 trees; it aims to reach 800 trees planted by the end of two years.

“Our motivation as young people is that future generations will not just hear stories about the gibbons, they’ll be able to see them from their backyards if they want,” said Rohim, a Mendolo farmer.

Besides supporting gibbons, the newly planted trees will also help with water conservation and prevent landslides, SwaraOwa researchers said.

The gibbon population in this mountainous part of Java has increased to 1,000 in 2023 from about 800 individuals 10 years ago. “That’s given us optimism that the future for the gibbons in this area looks bright,” said SwaraOwa gibbon researcher Arif Setiawan.

Watch the full Mongabay video here.

Banner image of a Javan gibbon, courtesy of Nanang Sujana.

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

In the Brazilian Amazon, where enforcement agents are spread thin across vast territories, an unlikely success story has emerged — not from drones or satellites, but from flip-flop-wearing locals paddling through forest rivers. A study examining 11 years of patrol data from two sustainable development reserves, Mamirauá and Amanã, has found that community-led voluntary environmental patrols were associated with an 80% drop in detected environmental crimes. By contrast, over the same period, government-led inspections outside these areas showed no such decline, reports contributor Fernanda Biasoli for Mongabay.

From 2003 to 2013, more than 19,000 patrols were conducted under the Voluntary Environmental Agents (VEA) program, launched in 1995. Armed with local knowledge and community trust, participants recorded more than 1,200 crimes, most of them related to fishing and hunting. Meanwhile, federal enforcement teams conducted 69 operations across broader areas, detecting fewer crimes overall and failing to demonstrate a meaningful reduction in infractions over time.

The discrepancy underscores a broader insight: legitimacy and local ownership can matter more than legal authority when it comes to enforcement. Community agents, motivated by a blend of cultural ties, informal authority and modest support from the state, were often more effective at both detecting and deterring infractions. Their efforts also coincided with greater adherence to local conservation norms and improved stewardship of natural resources.

Yet, this model is not without caveats. The VEA system does not replace government oversight. Indeed, researchers caution that increased community responsibility should not be mistaken for a mandate to reduce official support. “They should be seen as partners in a responsibility that mainly falls on the state and federal governments,” said Caetano Franco, the study’s lead author.

While some limitations remain, such as the potential for underreporting or shifting criminal tactics, the scale and consistency of the reductions suggest the results are real. In a region where government patrols are rare and corruption risks high, empowering trusted local actors may be the most pragmatic path to conservation. In the process, it gives the communities most affected by ecological degradation a central role in shaping their own environmental futures.

Read the full story by Fernanda Biasoli here.

Banner image: The Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Flooding from torrential rain in northeastern China has killed at least 60 people since July 29, according to Xia Linmao, the deputy mayor of Beijing, China’s capital city. 

The region hit hardest was the Beijing suburb of Miyun, where accumulated precipitation reached 543 millimeters (21.4 inches), nearing the annual average rainfall for Beijing, which is 585 mm (23 in).

In Miyun, 31 people died in a nursing home impacted by the flash flood. Another 16 people died in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, and an additional 18 people are still reported missing.

“I’ve never seen such ferocious floodwaters in my life,” Zhai Cheng’an, a 89-year-old resident of Taotiaogou, a remote village of Yanqing district in Beijing, told China Daily.

Deputy Mayor Xia announced that all major roads will be restored by July 31 and that villages have been served with emergency water supplies, adding that local governments need to improve preparation and relief efforts for extreme weather.

“Local governments lack adequate early warning systems for extreme weather, and disaster prevention plans are incomplete,” Xia said.  

More than 80,000 people have been relocated across Beijing. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) south of Beijing, 283,000 people have evacuated coastal areas as Typhoon Co-May sweeps through eastern China.

Chen Tao, chief forecaster at China’s National Meteorological Center, said the typhoon isn’t particularly strong but its slow movement could lead to dangerous levels of accumulated rainfall.

In the first half of 2025, China’s emergency ministry reported that almost 8 million people were impacted by floods, leaving 51 people killed or missing and 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) in damages. The numbers do not include the recent floods in Beijing or the typhoon in Shanghai.

In Beijing, the heavy rainfall that began July 29 has still not stopped and is set to continue through the week. China’s meteorological observatory maintained a red alert for heavy rain in several provinces, expected to last through the evening of Aug. 1.

Banner image: Damaged road littered with broken tree branches after a heavy rain in the Miyun district in the outskirts of Beijing, China. Image © Mahesh Kumar A./AP.

Fifteen teams have advanced to the semifinal round of XPRIZE’s $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, moving one step closer to proving that autonomous systems can detect and extinguish wildfires within 10 minutes across 1,000 square kilometers of challenging terrain. Part of a four-year, $11 million global competition launched in 2023, the initiative seeks to spur breakthroughs in rapid-response firefighting technology as climate-driven wildfires grow more frequent and destructive.

Selected from a global pool, these teams represent a range of institutions, from defense contractors to university research labs and even a high school in California. Each presents a unique solution that blends robotics, artificial intelligence, and wildfire science.

“The convergence of exponential technologies such as AI, robotics, drones, and sensors offers us the opportunity to detect wildfires at inception, and put them out in minutes before they spread—that’s the mission of this XPRIZE,” said Peter H. Diamandis, Executive Chairman of XPRIZE, at the time of the competition’s launch in 2023.

Many of the semifinalists take a “system-of-systems” approach. AeroWatch, a Spain-based consortium, is integrating components from over a dozen partners to create a unified interface for fire managers. Crossfire, based at the University of Maryland, deploys scout UAVs for surveillance and “Firejumper” drones for suppression. Its system was validated in a live-fire demonstration earlier this year.

Others focus on scale and speed. Canada’s FireSwarm Solutions is developing heavy-lift drone swarms capable of operating at night. Germany’s Dryad combines solar-powered sensors with reconnaissance and suppression UAVs to detect fires at the smoldering stage. Meanwhile, Anduril, a U.S. defense tech firm founded by Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey, is fielding its AI-enabled Lattice OS platform paired with advanced sensor towers and aerial reconnaissance.

Student-led teams are also in the mix. Wildfire Quest, from Valley Christian High School in San Jose, has built a solar-powered, self-replenishing drone system with an expandable suppression network. RAINDROPS, a collaboration between Norwegian and American universities, is piloting a low-cost system-of-systems architecture designed for global scalability.

This summer, the XPRIZE Wildfire team will visit each semifinalist’s test site to evaluate the systems in live field conditions. These trials will assess technical readiness, safety, connectivity, and resilience in real-world settings, including high heat, wind, and complex terrain. The Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration will oversee data capture for judging.

The stakes are high. According to XPRIZE, Extreme Wildfire Events now account for over 80% of fire-related damages worldwide.

“With over 30 years of experience in fire management, I’ve seen firsthand how devastating wildfires can be,” said Shawna Legarza, former director of fire and aviation at the USDA Forest Service, in the 2023 launch statement. “To better protect our land and ourselves, we need to change the way we detect and manage wildfires now.”