Aug. 25 is a National Day of Action to support U.S. national parks and public lands. One focus of the event is the U.S. government’s intention to rescind a rule that bans road construction and industrial logging across more than 23 million hectares (57 million acres) of national forest land.

The 2001 Roadless Rule, has helped protect some of the country’s most wild public lands, including Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest and the ancestral homeland of several Indigenous peoples.

“A rollback on the Roadless Rule means cultural genocide for our people,” Yolanda Fulmer of the Tlingit Indigenous nation and a Tongass representative with the California-based NGO Women Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), said in a statement. “Every part of our culture is intimately intertwined with the Tongass Forest, our traditional homelands.”

The Tongass spans 6.8 million hectares (17 million acres) of mountains, rivers, rugged coastline and old-growth forest. Nicknamed “America’s Climate Forest,” the Tongass holds 20% of all the carbon stored in the country’s national forests and provides habitat for some 400 wildlife species including bears, wolves and moose. It also supports roughly 40% of North American bird species.

If the Roadless Rule is rescinded, roughly 3.6 million hectares (9 million acres) of the Tongass could lose protections against new road development. Nationwide, 18 million hectares (45 million acres) of national forest system land could be affected.

In an Aug. 18 statement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers national forests through the U.S. Forest Service, said roads are necessary to maintain and protect forests. “Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions — overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease — turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the statement.

However, researchers found that between 1992 and 2024 wildfires were four times more likely near roads than in roadless areas. Another study found more than 90% of wildfires occurred within half a mile of a road.

“Constructing new logging roads into roadless areas will increase human-caused wildfire ignitions by careless recreationists, criminal arsonists, or simple accidents,” Carson States with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology said in a statement.

Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN executive director, told Mongabay the administration wants to rescind the Roadless Rule to “open up these roads for industry.”

The Roadless Rule also restricts timber, oil, gas, coal or mineral development on protected land. The Trump administration has issued a series of executive orders supporting such industries, including one aimed specifically at “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” 

In his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump exempted Tongass from the Roadless Rule; that decision drew half a million public comments, 96% of them opposed. U.S. President Joe Biden later reinstated protections.

“Across the country, people want forests, people want wildlife, people want there to be no roads so that we can enjoy these national treasures,” Lake said.  

A public comment period on the proposed Roadless Rule rollback will be open until Sept. 21.

Banner image: WECAN Tongass representatives protesting. Image courtesy of WECAN.

Indonesian authorities have charged 72 individuals with intentionally igniting forest fires across five provinces on the island of Borneo and four on Sumatra.

Fires across both islands have burned nearly 286,000 hectares (about 707,000 acres) of land from January to Aug. 24 alone, according to FireWatch, a satellite-based monitoring tool developed by forest-mapping platform Nusantara Atlas. That’s an area half the size of the island of Bali. Officials say prolonged dry conditions and a powerful El Niño this year have severely worsened the wildfires.

In a statement, local law enforcement alleged that the 72 suspects used fire to clear land in preparation for planting. Police seized lighters, fuel containers, machetes, axes, and samples of burned soil and tree trunks among various items of evidence.

The smoke from the wildfires has caused choking haze clouds that have reduced visibility to just 10 meters (33 feet) in one province, according to the Associated Press.

Mongabay previously reported that the fires have also caused hazardous air quality, and the destruction of vegetation has led to food shortages for wildlife like long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). The smoke has even drifted across the border to neighboring Malaysia.

The wildfires have also affected critical conservation work, Mongabay previously reported. In Borneo’s West Kalimantan province, fires came close to an orangutan rehabilitation facility run by the nonprofit YIARI, where more than 60 critically endangered Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are housed after being rescued from the illegal wildlife trade and habitat loss.

Meanwhile, the health toll is rising rapidly. In the six worst-affected provinces, the Indonesian Ministry of Health reported that acute respiratory infection cases have surged. In Central Kalimantan province, cases jumped by 78.1% in just one week, from 402 to 716, while West Kalimantan has recorded more than 151,000 cases since January.

In a press release, Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) said emergency responders have successfully extinguished or contained 526 hectares (1,299 acres) of active wildfires. This includes 71.5 hectares (176 acres) of localized brush and forest fire outbreaks, and 454 hectares (1,122 acres) of larger, high-priority peatland and forest blazes.

Firefighting operations so far have included air-dropping millions of liters of water on intense blazes in remote terrain from aircraft. On the ground, tens of thousands of personnel, including military units, professional firefighters, and volunteers, are also helping douse the flames directly.

Since fires frequently smolder deep in dry peatlands, crews are digging containment trenches — specialized water-filled barriers dug into the earth to isolate a fire — to block the fires’ spread. The BNPB also said authorities are carrying out cloud seeding to induce rainfall.

Banner image: Firefighters carry their equipment as they attempt to extinguish a wildfire in a peatland area in Palembang, South Sumatra province, on Aug. 11. Image by AP Photo/Muhammad Hatta.

BUNIA, Congo (AP) — More than 300 people died of Ebola in eastern Congo in the past week, one of the highest weekly tolls yet, government data showed Monday, as health workers struggle to catch up with an outbreak that is spreading at unprecedented speed.

Ministry of Health data showed that as of Saturday, the outbreak had recorded 5,514 cases and 2,642 deaths, including 317 deaths reported in the previous seven days. But Congolese experts have said the outbreak that started weeks before it was confirmed could be three times the known size.

This is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history, with many people dying outside treatment centers. It has recorded seven times more deaths at this stage than the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak that is the deadliest in history with over 11,000 in all.

Most new cases in Ituri province, the current epicenter, still come from outside monitored contacts.

Nearly half of people infected have died — 47.9% — but the government data shows much higher rates in hard-to-reach areas such as North Kivu province, which has a fatality rate of 68.6%.

Frontline workers to receive vaccine used in past outbreaks

A key challenge has been the lack of approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo virus responsible for the outbreak.

On Friday, Congo received more than 16,000 doses of the Ervebo vaccine that was effective in past Ebola outbreaks caused by a different, more common type. The World Health Organization says it also will be used in clinical trials for a Bundibugyo virus vaccine.

WHO says it’s not known whether Ervebo can protect against the Bundibugyo virus, although early laboratory and animal data suggest it may offer some protection.

Officials have not said when the vaccine will be rolled out to frontline workers. In Ituri, locals expressed optimism that it will help slow the outbreak.

“I am very pleased that these vaccines have finally arrived,” said Héritier Ramazani, a resident. “We are fed up with recording new cases of Ebola every day.”

The outbreak is unfolding in some of the most challenging conditions imaginable, with rebel threats and intense population movements.

Medical teams in Ituri and other affected provinces also face work stoppages by responders who haven’t been paid, anger from long-traumatized communities, bad roads and misinformation claiming that Ebola isn’t real.

Experts believe the virus was spreading in the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

By Associated Press

Banner image: People dressed in protective gear unload a coffin containing the remains of six-year-old Baudjo Baraka Jules, who died of Ebola, for a burial service in Bunia, Ituri province, eastern Congo, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026. Image courtesy of Dieudonne Dirole, Associated Press. 

In Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county, deforestation for cocoa has soared since 2020, pushing the region’s cocoa trade into an uncertain future. The EU is Liberia’s biggest cocoa customer, but is set to implement the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which bans the import of forest products, including cocoa, made on land deforested after Dec. 31, 2020, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.

“If cocoa from Liberia was produced on land cleared after that EUDR cutoff date, it would fail on deforestation grounds,” Owen Gibbons, senior manager for global advocacy and UK public affairs, at the Rainforest Alliance, told Mongabay.

In 2024, the EU imported more than 17,000 metric tons of cocoa from Liberia, a 30% increase in two years.

Soon, Liberian cocoa producers will have to show their beans weren’t produced on forest land cleared after December 2020. However, most cacao plantations in Grand Gedeh are deep inside forests. In fact, much of the forest loss in the region has occurred since 2020. Before that, 99% of the county was covered by forests.

Some forests are communally owned and private individuals can lease them out. However, cacao plantations have also encroached into other forests, including the proposed Kwa National Park area, where commercial agriculture is currently banned.

To meet the EUDR requirements, cocoa producers will have to show their EU customers exactly where the cocoa plantations are and when they started production. Tracing every plantation and its production is a massive undertaking. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, both major cocoa exporters, have spent years establishing traceability systems. Liberia only started recently.

“Liberia is at a very early stage on all these fronts,” Gibbons said. “There is no national traceability infrastructure comparable to what exists in Côte d’Ivoire or Ghana.”

Even if Liberia puts a traceability system together, the EU could still reject its cocoa since most of the deforestation in Grand Gedeh happened post 2020.

As uncertainties loom, many people in the country involved in the cocoa trade are unaware of the implications of the EUDR, including Lincoln Daslah, secretary of a cocoa-buying collective and a middleman between producers in Grand Gedeh and exporters in Monrovia.

When told about the regulation, Daslah said that while he knows the forest is disappearing, he doesn’t understand why the EU would want to hurt his business.

However, some EU policymakers said the rule is still necessary to protect forests in counties like Grand Gedeh.

“I understand the frustration of farmers in Liberia that just started production in that sense and aren’t ready,” said Delara Burkhardt, a German member of the European Parliament. “I think still in the long term we have to make sure that sustainable practices are supported, and clear-cutting forests is something that breaches the law.”

Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here.

Banner image: Traders sorting through cocoa beans in Grand Gedeh, Liberia. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

Endangered Asiatic wild dogs in central India almost entirely eat wild prey, even where they overlap with livestock, according to a recent study.

The findings show that maintaining healthy wild prey populations is key to conserving the species, reports contributor Rajeev Tyagi for Mongabay India.

The study, led by the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru and the Maharashtra Forest Department, analyzed the feces or scat of dholes or Asiatic wild dogs (Cuon alpinus) inside the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in the state of Maharashtra.

Instead of scooping up entire piles of dhole scat, forest staff and researchers collected only small pinches of material during the monsoon and winter of 2022-2023.

Researchers then used a method called DNA metabarcoding to analyze what the dholes had eaten. It’s a technique that extracts genetic material from fecal samples and matches it against a massive reference database containing information from tens of thousands of species.

Traditional methods for analyzing carnivore diets rely on microhistology — examining prey hairs found in animal feces of scat under a microscope. But this method is vulnerable to observer bias, said study co-author and molecular ecologist Abhinav Tyagi.

“Different people can categorise hair differently, and it induces a human or an observer’s bias,” Tyagi said.

Arjun Srivathsa, a wildlife biologist affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society – India and not involved in the study, said that traditional methods are also prone to errors like misidentification of species or non-detection of certain species.

However, the DNA barcoding method removes observer bias and makes data comparable across studies, Tyagi said.

The DNA analysis revealed that dholes feed overwhelmingly on wild herbivores like sambar deer (Rusa unicolor), wild pigs (Sus scrofa), and chital (Axis axis). Livestock made up only a marginal, negligible part of their diet, even in buffer zones where grazing by livestock is common.

“Irrespective of season, irrespective of area, [their diet] is mostly wild prey,” Tyagi told Mongabay India.

Srivathsa told Mongabay India that dholes “are hypercarnivores and rely substantially on wild prey even when there is domestic livestock available in the landscape.” Although not directly involved in the study, Srivathsa reviewed its manuscript.

Dholes have lost roughly 80% of their historic range, with only 1,000 to 2,000 adults left globally.

“If we increase wild prey density, then dhole populations might come up in numbers,” Tyagi said.

However, increasing wild herbivore populations is a delicate process, according to Abraham Pious, a researcher who has studied dhole diets in Valparai in southern India and was not involved in the study. Herbivores often raid local crops, which can fuel other forms of human-wildlife conflict, he told Mongabay India.

“Conservation should never be at the cost of people who co-exist with the animals,” said Pious.

Read the full story by Rajeev Tyagi here.

Banner image: Asiatic wild dogs or dholes in Bandipur National Park, India. Image by Dineshkannambadi via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Xokleng Indigenous people of Santa Catarina state of southern Brazil have planted nearly a  100,000 seedlings of a critically endangered native tree, Mongabay contributor Letícia Klein reported.

The Brazilian pine (Araucaria angustifolia), or araucária, can grow more than 50 meters (164 feet) tall and has a straight trunk with a broad crown of branches near its top. Araucária pine forests historically covered large swathes of southern Brazil, but their range declined by roughly 97% in the last century.

“Just as our pine is endangered, my people are also endangered, and consequently our language and culture are endangered,” Carl Gakran, executive director of the Zág (pronounced zā) Institute, told Klein. The institute was founded in conjunction with Isabel Gakran, his wife, to organize and expand the replanting effort.

Carl Gakran began the restoration effort in 2016 after he learned that the Brazilian pine was listed as critically endangered by the IUCN Red List, the global conservation authority. He initially planned to grow just 10 trees on his own property. But the idea gained traction with the community, and they began the project the following year.

Araucária pine trees produce edible nuts called pinhão, a staple food in the culinary tradition of southern Brazil. They are also eaten by at least another 22 animal species. Project organizers and volunteers harvest the seeds but leave at least 40% behind for wildlife.

“Following our elders’ knowledge, we speak to the seeds, explain what’s happening, and perform harvest rituals. We harvest 60%, no more than that, respecting the tree and the animals that feed on it,” Gakran said.

To date, the team has planted Brazilian pines across more than 1,000 hectares (nearly 2,500 acres) of their 37,000-hectare (91,400-acre) Ibirama-La Klãnõ Indigenous Territory, home to about 2,000 Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang people.

The territory is only a third of the way through the demarcation process to legally secure the land for the Indigenous groups; the process often takes years. The replanting effort, Gakran said, also helps to strengthen their claim to their ancestral land.

Zág now routinely works with about 30 to 40 volunteers to collect seeds, grow seedlings and restore degraded areas. Participation rises to about 60 people during harvest and distribution periods.

In the 10 years since the project began, the institute has produced more than 140,000 seedlings of the endangered tree.

The institute also removes nonnative trees such as slash pines (Pinus elliottii) and species of eucalyptus that they replace with native trees.

“Brazilian pines are sacred to us,” Gakran said. “You can’t tell the story of our people without speaking of them. Our creation myth says the protective animal was made from that tree, so it appears in the very first story.”

Read Mongabay’s full story here.

Banner image: Carl and Isabel Gakran, leaders of the Zág Institute, with their daughter Zágtxo, on the Ibirama-La Klãnõ Indigenous Territory. Image courtesy of Anderson Coelho.