Founder's briefs News

Founder’s Briefs is an occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Rhett founded Mongabay in 1999 to raise awareness about tropical forests and biodiversity. In 2012, he transitioned Mongabay to a non-profit organization and oversaw its growth into a multinational, multilingual news service. Beyond Mongabay, Rhett has advised a range of institutions, while his writing and photography have appeared in hundreds of publications. Rhett's work has been recognized with the Heinz Award and the Parker/Gentry Award, among other honors.

For 50 years, Philip Fearnside has calculated the costs of losing the Amazon

Rhett Ayers Butler 31 Aug 2026

Renato Moraes de Jesus. Photo courtesy of the Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Agronomia do Espírito Santo (Crea-ES)

Renato Moraes de Jesus was a pioneer of Atlantic Forest restoration in Brazil

Rhett Ayers Butler 21 Jul 2026

Florida Manatee. Photo credit: Robert Bonde / USGS

America’s retreat from wildlife protection will be felt far beyond its borders

Rhett Ayers Butler 20 Jul 2026

Félix Guillermo Moncada Gavilán

Félix Guillermo Moncada Gavilán helped move Cuba from sea turtle fishing to protection

Rhett Ayers Butler 20 Jul 2026

Ronald Sanabria. From his Facebook account.

Ronald Sanabria sought to make tourism more sustainable

Rhett Ayers Butler 17 Jul 2026

Sitesh Ranjan Deb at his facility. Image via Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Sitesh Ranjan Deb turned a hunter’s knowledge to saving wildlife

Rhett Ayers Butler 15 Jul 2026

Bill Montevecchi. Photo courtesy of the Pacific Seabirds Group which honored Montevecchi with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.

Bill Montevecchi showed what seabirds could tell us about the sea

Rhett Ayers Butler 15 Jul 2026

Gus Mills with a cheetah. Sourced via the Endangered Wildlife Trust

Gus Mills, hyena expert and ‘the cheerful pessimist of the Kalahari’, has died

Rhett Ayers Butler 14 Jul 2026

Linda Ingham with Pacific white-sided dolphin caught in Japanese driftnet, north Pacific. Photo © Greenpeace / Roger Grace

A marine protected area can ban fishing boats. It cannot stop drifting gear

Rhett Ayers Butler 13 Jul 2026

Lydia Möcklinghoff with a giant anteater. From her social media.

Lydia Möcklinghoff, champion of the giant anteater, has died in a plane crash. She was 45

Rhett Ayers Butler 11 Jul 2026

Mohammed Abu Daya, right, collects data on a spinetail devil ray that fishers brought to shore in Gaza in 2015. Image courtesy of Mohammed Abu Daya and Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara.

The Gaza scientist still tracking rays from a war zone

Rhett Ayers Butler 7 Jul 2026

María Laura Tolmos, 37, turned a childhood in the Amazon into her life’s work

Rhett Ayers Butler 6 Jul 2026

Mel Sunquist

Mel Sunquist, field biologist and mentor to generations of conservationists

Rhett Ayers Butler 28 Jun 2026

A bonobo observes its surroundings from the canopy in Salonga National Park. Earning the trust of wild bonobos is a painstaking process that begins before dawn and can take years to achieve. Photo by Alice Péretié / Chengeta Wildlife.

Before tourists can see bonobos, trackers must earn their trust

Rhett Ayers Butler 23 Jun 2026

Researcher pointing to fungi in Yunnan, China. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

The case for field stations

Rhett Ayers Butler 23 Jun 2026

Rain over the Amazon. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

South America’s farms depend, in part, on a healthy Amazon

Rhett Ayers Butler 22 Jun 2026

The remnants of Upper Guinean Tropical Rainforest within Sierra Leone are home to a multitude of species, many of them threatened, such as the white-necked rockfowl (Picathartes gymnocephalus). Image by Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A few seconds with one of West Africa’s rarest birds

Rhett Ayers Butler 22 Jun 2026

Mona Khalil in 2002 at in Tyre. Photo by Jihad Seqlawi/AFP/Getty Images

Mona Khalil, who left safety in Europe to protect sea turtles in Lebanon, was killed by an Israeli airstrike

Rhett Ayers Butler 21 Jun 2026

Monika Silva Koniuszek, 41, defended the everyday things corruption corrodes

Rhett Ayers Butler 18 Jun 2026

The Eighty Mile Beach is a nesting site for the flatback turtle.

Australia establishes the first Sea Country Indigenous Protected Area

Rhett Ayers Butler 15 Jun 2026

Tony Parkes. Photo courtesy of Big Scrub Landcare

Tony Parkes, the banker who replanted a rainforest

Rhett Ayers Butler 14 Jun 2026

Recent fires in the Amazon Rainforest degraded a large portion of the world’s primary forests. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.

Amazon deforestation alerts fall to lowest 12-month level since 2014, show Brazilian data

Rhett Ayers Butler 14 Jun 2026

A Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) in India. Image by Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Cambodia wants its tigers back. So it plans to import Bengal tigers from India

Rhett Ayers Butler 11 Jun 2026

Soundscape Baselines Site in Baraboo Hills, Wisconsin, USA, includes view of bioacoustic recorder and camera trap

Why conservation urgently needs acoustic baselines

Rhett Ayers Butler 9 Jun 2026

This platypus is ready for release, after being captured, weighed, measured and given a health assessment.

What the platypus can teach us about smarter conservation

Rhett Ayers Butler 8 Jun 2026

A school of albacore tuna gathered by a seine net, off the Seychelles. Photo by Marc Taquet

Tuna are rebounding. The work is far from done.

Rhett Ayers Butler 8 Jun 2026

A European wildcat in Scotland, where 46 captive-bred wildcats have been released as part of an ongoing reintroduction project. The cats are repopulating former habitat in the Cairngorms mountain range in the eastern highlands.

The European wildcat is back. In some places.

Rhett Ayers Butler 3 Jun 2026

Brooklyn Rivera. Photo courtesy of La Prensa,

Brooklyn Rivera, defender of Nicaragua’s Indigenous lands, dies in detention

Rhett Ayers Butler 1 Jun 2026

One of many unattributed AI-generated images doing the rounds on social media.

The new burden of proving wildlife is real

Rhett Ayers Butler 29 May 2026

Amazon rainforest canopy. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

The Amazon’s path from crisis to durability

Rhett Ayers Butler 28 May 2026

A leopard cat in India’s West Bengal state. India’s population of leopard cats is not contiguous, with individuals in the western part of the country isolated from the rest of the leopard cat’s range. Image by Soumyajit Nandy via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Asia’s overlooked leopard cat

Rhett Ayers Butler 26 May 2026

Brazil has protected much of the Amazon. It now has to pay for it.

Rhett Ayers Butler 26 May 2026

The plight of koalas was a factor in creating this new national park, but 66 threatened animals and 37 threatened flora species are also found here.

Great Koala National Park tests whether protected forests can stay connected

Rhett Ayers Butler 25 May 2026

« Previous 1 2 3 4 … 10 Next »

Latest Specials

Western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ssp. verus) in the Guinea forest. Image by ©Juan Maza.

Guinea’s Iron Frontier

Samburu pastoralists walking with their herd.

Pastoralists in a Changing World

Cassandra Garduño in a wooden boat.

Hands On: Stories that build change

Forest Restoration Solutions

Finning the High Seas

Mamá Conchita in her chagra with her dogs.

Women Defenders of the Colombian Amazon

The Ideas Shaping Environmental Action

The Future of Suriname’s Rainforests

Interested in other Mongabay websites?

Earth HQ

Data Studio

Conservation Effectiveness

Mongabay Latam

Reforestation App

Mongabay Indonesia

News and Inspiration from Nature's Frontline.

African dwarf crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis).

you're currently offline