After half a century of steep declines, North America’s birds are disappearing faster than ever. A new study shows that populations are shrinking across most of the continent, with intensive agriculture playing the largest role in accelerating those losses. Scientists warn the impacts extend well beyond wildlife, undermining ecosystem function and human well-being.

The recent study, published in Science, relied on data collected by the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS), a citizen science initiative that has collected annual bird population data since 1966. Thousands of trained amateur birders conduct standardized counts for the BBS along fixed routes across North America, recording species presence and abundance year after year.

Researchers analyzed BBS data collected between 1987 and 2021 from 1,033 of the survey routes. They tracked the change in abundance of 261 bird species across 10 different habitats.

They found population declines across nearly every region, with the most severe declines in hot Southern states.

In fact, already quite-hot states, like Florida and Texas, had the “most pronounced average decline” of bird abundance, the study notes. “Just looking at the decline of abundance … temperature was the main predictor,” François Leroy, the study’s lead author and an Ohio State University postdoctoral researcher, told Mongabay in a video call.

While plenty of other studies have linked warmer temperatures due to climate change with degraded habitat and a shift north by birds to cooler climates, Leroy’s findings suggest that such warming is most impactful in regions that were already quite hot.

However, the scientists discovered that the strongest predictor of accelerating population declines was not temperatures, but agricultural intensity. The U.S. Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and California — all agricultural hubs — also showed the highest rates of accelerating decline.

“Accelerating declines suggest that pressures on bird populations may be intensifying,” Fengyi Guo, a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, not involved with the study, told Mongabay by email.

Agriculture is associated with a trifecta of challenges for birds: pesticides, fertilizers, and large areas of habitat-reducing cropland.

Leroy notes that his team wasn’t looking for this correlation before or during the study, but a subsequent review of the related scientific literature revealed a pattern: “There are so many studies in Europe, in the U.S., everywhere in the world, that actually link some of those [agricultural] practices with a negative impact on biodiversity.”

Birds perform vital ecosystem services that support agriculture and food security, including seed dispersal, pollination, nutrient cycling and pest control. They also keep mosquitoes in check, insects that can transmit diseases including malaria and dengue fever.

“The ecosystem services provided by the birds are really key to the environment,” Leroy said. In light of the study’s findings, he called on governments and farmers to consider implementing safer farming practices to protect birds. Residents can also do their part by planting native plants, reducing pesticide use and keeping domestic cats indoors.

Banner image: A flock of birds flying over a field. Image by Dariusz Grosa via Pexels.

Researchers say seven seal pups have tested positive for an avian flu virus at California’s Año Nuevo State Park and several more are showing signs of the illness. The outbreak has prompted park officials to cancel the park’s popular seal-watching tours for the remainder of the seal breeding season.

Researchers with University of California-Santa Cruz and University of California-Davis made the announcement Wednesday, calling it the first detected outbreak of the virus among marine mammals in California.

The worldwide bird flu outbreak that began in 2020 has led to the deaths of millions of domesticated birds and spread to wildlife around the world, and seals and sea lions appear to be particularly vulnerable to the disease. The virus has led to the deaths of thousands of sea lions in Chile and Peru, thousands of elephant seals in Argentina, and hundreds of seals in New England in recent years.

The virus is considered to be a low risk to humans, but officials said people should avoid approaching the seals and keep pets away from the animals.

Thousands of elephant seals come to Año Nuevo State Park, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco, every winter to fight, mate and give birth. The annual spectacle draws tourists and wildlife watchers eager to see the largest seals on the planet, some watching from public viewing areas and others signing up for docent-led guided walks through the breeding grounds, known as rookeries.

But for now, the viewing area is closed, and tours at Año Nuevo have been canceled “out of an abundance of caution,” said Jordan Burgess, the deputy district superintendent of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Officials hope the move will help prevent any spread of the disease that might be caused by people tracking through the areas where the elephant seals are living, she said.

“We’re definitely not panicking about human exposure at this point,” but rather trying to ensure the health of the seals and people in general, Burgess said.

Christine Johnson, the director of the Institute for Pandemic Insights at UC Davis’ Weill School of Veterinary Medicine, said the outbreak was spotted quickly because researchers have been on high alert in recent years, watching for any sign of the arrival of the disease. After sick and dead animals were spotted on Feb. 19 and 20, researchers collected samples for testing at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System. The screening showed the animals were infected with HPAI H5N1 virus.

Tests on samples from about 30 more animals are still pending, Johnson said.

The university researchers are working with state and federal wildlife managers and The West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network to monitor the animals.

By Rebecca Boone, Associated Press

Banner image: Elephant seals rest on a beach at Año Nuevo State Park, Friday, Jan. 16, 2026, in Pescadero, California. Photo courtesy of Godofredo A. Vásquez via Associated Press. 

Brazil has revoked a presidential decree that placed sections of three Amazonian rivers — the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins — under a state-led privatization program. Indigenous groups had protested the plan for 33 days by blockading a Cargill grain port in Santarém in the western Brazilian Amazon.

The decree was a part of a larger infrastructure initiative to create an industrial export route for freight barges carrying soy, corn and other grains from Brazil’s agricultural states in the Cerrado and the Amazon to ports on the Atlantic coast.

For more than a month, hundreds of Indigenous protesters demanded that the government halt the initiative. They raised concerns that the project would damage the rivers and threaten at least 17 Indigenous territories and many more riverine communities.

The protesters occupied Cargill’s terminal in Santarém. Archaeologists say it was built in 2003 on top of a precolonial archaeological site called Porto, a claim Cargill denies. Today, the site is the biggest export terminal on the Tapajós River, with an annual export capacity of 4.9 million metric tons.  

According to a 2013 study, bone fragments were identified in a ceramic urn excavated from the Porto site. Records also show the Santarém area was once one of the most densely populated regions in the Amazon, and that many Indigenous people were killed there by European colonists.

“We have to protect this river, we have to protect this forest,” Indigenous leader Alessandra Korap Munduruku said from the port, in a video published after the government’s announcement. “This place is sacred. This place is the cemetery of our ancestors, who were massacred here. And now, they have witnessed our victory.”

The decision to revoke the decree, first approved in August 2025, was published in the Official Gazette, the federal government’s daily legal bulletin, on Feb. 23. The move came after a meeting between the protesters, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, and Guilherme Boulos, the secretary of the presidency.

“The decision to revoke Decree 12.600 was finalized today. This is a government committed to listening to the people, to workers, to Indigenous peoples,” Boulos said at a Feb. 23 press conference in Brasília.

Banner image: Demonstrators in Santarém, Pará state, Brazil. Image courtesy of Amazon Watch.

Six young journalists, scattered across three continents and connected largely by screens, recently attempted an unusual exercise: writing letters addressed to the future instead of to editors. All six were members of the 2025 cohort of the English-language Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellowship. The results read like field notes from a generation that has come of age amid overlapping ecological and informational strain. Their concerns differ in detail, yet converge on a single question: Wwhat kind of journalism will be needed when crisis becomes a daily condition?

For Shradha Triveni (India), environmental change permeates daily life. She describes working in cities where pollution is a lived reality and where trust in media is eroding as audiences migrate to video platforms and social feeds. Reinventing storytelling, she suggests, has become essential to journalism’s survival. Lee Kwai Han (Malaysia), arrives at a similar destination by tracing her journey from skepticism about sensational coverage to confidence in rigorous editing and verification as journalism’s distinguishing features. Ethics, in her telling, serves as the discipline that keeps reporting coherent and credible.

Elsewhere, the letters dwell on what conventional coverage often overlooks. Manuel Fonseca (Colombia) reflects on the tendency to reduce assassinated environmental defenders to statistics, arguing that numbers alone cannot explain why individuals remain in dangerous places to protect land and water. Blaise Kasereka Makuta (Democratic Republic of Congo) offers a meditation on traditional medicine, treating it as a knowledge system threatened by displacement, climate change and institutional neglect. The future, he implies, will judge whether such knowledge was documented in time to survive.

Hope appears in the collection, though it is measured and grounded. Fernanda Biasoli (Brazil) locates it in networks of young reporters sharing ideas across borders, likening environmental journalism to a river basin in which many tributaries sustain a larger flow. Samuel Ogunsona (Nigeria), writing ahead of last year’s climate summit, sees potential for regions often cast as victims to shape solutions, provided global commitments materialize.

Taken together, the letters offer a view of journalism as infrastructure that supports public understanding and accountability. Training programs that cultivate local expertise, their mentor Karen Coates notes, can ripple outward as alumni launch new desks or influence public debates in their home countries.

The implication is pragmatic. In places where environmental decisions determine livelihoods and stability, credible information guides choices and public oversight.

There is also an implicit rebuke to extractive reporting, the practice of parachuting into communities and leaving little behind. Ethical coverage requires collaboration, accessibility and sustained engagement so that those whose stories are told can benefit from them.

None of the fellows claim that journalism can avert the crises they describe. Their letters are more modest, and perhaps more durable, in their ambition. They suggest that the future will depend partly on whether societies maintain the capacity to observe carefully, verify honestly and tell complex stories without turning them into spectacle. In that sense, the letters function as commitments as much as reflections: a promise that someone, somewhere, intends to keep paying attention.

The Australian government spends more money on activities that harm biodiversity than those that protect biodiversity, a new study suggests.

Australia is a biodiversity hotspot, home to more than two-thirds of the world’s marsupials and a high rate of endemic species, but the country has suffered significant species extinctions since European arrival.

Under Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), Australia’s government agreed to identify spending that harms the country’s plants, animals and fungi by 2025, and reduce it by 2030. However, the government has yet to release such estimates, so a team of researchers did it themselves.

“The urgency of the 2030 reform deadline, and the ongoing deterioration of Australia’s environment, made it clear that this work couldn’t wait,” lead author Paul Elton of Australian National University told Mongabay by email.

The study analyzed the federal government’s 2022-2023 budget using a method recommended by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It identified subsidies in the form of payments and tax concessions that may be harmful to biodiversity. Experts and collaborators from the Australian Biodiversity Council then ranked the impacts from those subsidies on biodiversity.

The researchers found that between 2022 and 2023, Australia’s government spent A$26.3 billion ($18.6 billion) — or 1.1% of the country’s gross domestic product — on subsidies for activities believed to cause at least a medium level of harm to biodiversity. This stands in sharp contrast with the current spending on biodiversity conservation, estimated by the Biodiversity Council at less than A$0.8 billion ($0.6 billion) per year.

The bulk of the harmful subsidies identified in the report were for fossil fuel extraction and use (A$14.1 billion, or $10 billion). Transportation infrastructure accounted for an additional (A$8.5 billion, or $6 billion). Harmful subsidies were also identified in agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.

The more than A$26 billion in spending is a conservative estimate due to data limitations, and that’s only federal spending; it doesn’t account for subsidies from state and territory governments.

A representative with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) told Mongabay by email that “The Australian Government continues to make investments and take actions to halt and reverse the decline of biodiversity, this includes working with all levels of government and parts of society to drive improvements in nature.” They note that the total budgeted spending for the environment in the DCCEEW portfolio from 2025-2026 to 2028-2029 is A$10.1 billion ($7.1 billion).

The report authors suggest that prioritizing fiscal reforms across the economy could help Australia meet its biodiversity targets. However, they caution that reforms must be implemented in a fair and just way that considers affected communities and industries.

“Australia can and should play a leading role in demonstrating how a wealthy, megadiverse nation transforms its fiscal policy to support rather than erode biodiversity,” Elton said.

Banner image: Red kangaroos (Osphranter rufus). Image © Richard Crook via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

JUIZ DE FORA, Brazil (AP) — Families of those killed in the devastating floods in southeastern Brazil began burying the dead on Wednesday, as the death toll climbed to at least 40 in the state of Minas Gerais.

All the victims found so far are in the cities of Juiz de Fora and Uba, about 310 kilometers (192 miles) north of Rio de Janeiro. Some 30 people are still missing and more than 3,000 residents have been forced to leave their homes as of Wednesday morning, according to Minas Gerais’s fire department.

Among the dead was 11-year-old Bernardo Lopes Dutra, after the rain caused his house to collapse.

“It’s a tragedy that no one was expecting,” his father, Ricardo Dutra, said at the funeral in Juiz de Fora. He described Bernardo as “a boy with a big heart who, in his own way, touched everyone around him.” Dutra’s wife and daughter were still in a hospital.

The Rev. Ananias Simões, the pastor at the church that Dutra and his family regularly attended in Juiz de Fora, said that the building has been turned into a temporary shelter.

“We’re doing what we can, collecting food, water. We’re in a war situation,” Simões said.

Dário Tibério, a 41-year-old truck driver, decided to leave his house along with his family for fear of collapse. He found refuge at the church, while he waits on authorities to say his home is risk-free.

“There’s a danger that the mud and earth can come and bury us along with the debris. We have this feeling of insecurity,” he said.

The streets of Juiz de Fora, a city of 560,000, were covered in mud as authorities feared more landslides. Life in neighboring Uba, with its 107,000 residents, came to a stop. Classes were suspended in both cities, their mayors said.

Juiz de Fora’s City Hall said in a statement that around 600 families living in endangered areas were about to be relocated to local schools improvised as shelters and that the city experienced double the rain expected for February. Mayor Margarida Salomão said at least 20 landslides had been reported since the torrential rain began Monday evening.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on his social media channels Tuesday that security forces have been deployed on rescue missions and are providing immediate assistance to the population affected by the rain. He also said health care teams were sent to the region, which lies close to hills, valleys and slopes.

Scientists say extreme weather is happening more frequently due to human-caused climate change.

By Diarlei Rodrigues and Eléonore Hughes, Associated Press

Banner image: Collapsed homes sit after heavy rains and severe flooding in the Parque Burnier neighborhood of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais state, Brazil, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. Photo courtesy of Silvia Izquierdo via Associated Press