This episode of the Mongabay Newscast takes a look at our new investigative series, “Indonesia for Sale,” and also features a new acoustic study of Amazonian bats.

We recently published the first installment of a new investigative series Mongabay is doing in collaboration with The Gecko Project. The series is called “Indonesia For Sale,” and the first article looks at the land deals — and the powerful politicians and businessmen behind them — that paved the way for the explosion of industrial agriculture Indonesia has seen in recent decades.

Mongabay’s Indonesia-based editor Phil Jacobson joined the Newscast in our Brooklyn-based studio to tell us all about this important reporting project — last year he appeared on the Newscast to discuss the impacts of climate change on the Mekong Delta.

Then we speak with Adrià López-Baucells, a PhD student in bat ecology and conservation whose acoustic studies of bats in the central Amazon document the effects of forest fragmentation on bat foraging behavior. In this Field Notes segment, López-Baucells plays some of the recordings and explains how these recordings have led to new species being found in the central Amazon for the first time.

• Cash for conservation: Do payments for ecosystem services work?
• Mexico takes ‘unprecedented’ action to save vaquita
• First-ever population estimate of the mysterious marbled cat from continental Asia revealed
• Record Amazon fires stun scientists; sign of sick, degraded forests
• Trade in silky and thresher sharks now to be strictly regulated
• Ivory is out in the UK, as government moves to shutter legal trade
• Myanmar caves yield up 19 new gecko species

You can read more about all of these top news items here on Mongabay. And if you’d like to request email alerts when we publish new stories on specific topics that you care about most, from forests and oceans to indigenous people’s rights and more, visit alerts.mongabay.com and sign up!

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001