As a biology undergraduate, Talia Speaker spent a grueling summer hiking around the mountains near Santa Cruz, California, interning with a team that monitored puma behavior. In one hand she…
For many people, extinction is a term that refers to the past. It’s meant for dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and so many other species only found in textbooks or on display…
As deforestation and subsequent human expansion into natural areas continue, separating people from wildlife is unrealistic. Even in “pristine” landscapes, like national parks, humans and wildlife are always sharing the…
Some people know that they want to be scientists from an early age. Not so with Sara Beery. The computer vision expert got started on her path to science in…
It was 2008, and Danielle Kessler was sitting in front of her computer, shocked by what she was seeing on the internet: a live rhino for sale. The internet and…
When Elisa Panjang was 10 years old, playing outside her home in Sandakan, a small town in Malaysian Borneo, she heard a snuffling sound near the forest’s edge. As she…
In 2016, during the height of the rhino poaching war, field rangers in Kruger National Park in South Africa saw sobering scenes day after day. The field reports showed just…
To the Haudenosaunee, water is life. In their creation story, deep water covered the Earth, until a woman, known as Sky Woman, fell from an island in the sky. Birds…
Nearing the end of her undergraduate studies in ecology, Drea Darby sat frustrated at her desk, searching for jobs in conservation. She had envisioned a career out in the field,…
To hear an audio version of this article, listen here: Technology isn’t always a practical solution for Indigenous communities fighting for their land rights. Some technology requires internet access, which…
Drifting down the Dubo River through Sapo National Park in Liberia, Shadrach Kerwillain, a project manager for Fauna & Flora International (FFI), takes a sample of fresh river water. It’s…
Twice a year, thousands of members of South Africa’s Nazareth Baptist Church clothe themselves in spots and walk to their holy grounds in KwaZulu-Natal province to take up a dance.…
When Sellemah was a girl, in the days when the Tl’ches archipelago was still inhabited, the tide pools were full of urchins. The Songhees Nation elder, who also goes by the…
Though other stories might have dominated the headlines, 2020 was a year of tremendous change in land use and land cover. Massive fires burned across Australia, the Amazon, and the…
On a humid morning in 2019, Lily Xu watched as a patrolling ranger driving a motorbike down a remote forest road in Cambodia signaled his group to stop and pull…
Early on the morning of Sept. 16, 2018, an olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) hauled herself out of the ocean along a beach on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. Moving…
Unless you’re thinking of the colorful characters in the movie Finding Nemo, the first word you think of for coral reef fish is probably not “social.” But after spending a…
It’s fall in Nunavut, Canada, and Richard Kakk is hunting caribou. Snow that started in September has placed him in a landscape of white, broken only by the ice-crusted slate…
In August, whale-watchers witnessed something remarkable off the coast of California: 30 blue whales, the largest animal that has ever lived and a typically solitary species, all feeding in the…
When the elephant arrived in the night, on the hunt for sugarcane, Uthorn Kanthong was waiting for him. Like many of his neighbors, the 69-year-old Thai farmer had taken to…
In the late 1990s, a Yale ecologist named Oswald Schmitz and his students made an interesting discovery by gluing spiders’ mouths shut. Schmitz’s team placed the glued spiders in enclosed…
It’s a warm May morning in 2015, and beneath a chorus of birds and insects, a small gray-brown dog plops down in front of a camera perched in the Amazon…
Whether it was radio-collaring elephants across the savannas of South Africa, competing internationally alongside the Israeli national team in tennis, tracking saki monkeys through the rainforest in the sweltering mid-day…
