MEXICO CITY, MEXICO — Purchasing illegal jaguar parts — from teeth to skins to claws — doesn’t always involve seeking out the dark, nefarious corners of the black market. Often,…
Some of the last remaining carbon sinks in the Amazon Rainforest are largely managed by Indigenous people, a new report from the World Resources Institute says. In areas of the…
A resplendent rainbow fish, a frog that looks like chocolate, a Thai tarantula, an anemone that rides on a back of a hermit crab, and the world's largest waterlily are…
Flying this November into a remote region of the Orinoquía savanna in Vichada, Colombia, environmental biologist Jacobo Arango could spot the Hacienda San José cattle ranch that his team was…
COLCHANI, Bolivia — Bolivia is taking another shot at lithium investment. After decades of stalled projects and soured relationships with international investors, the central government, under left-wing President Luis Arce,…
JAKARTA — Indonesian academics have called out the government for banning five foreign scientists after they questioned official claims of an increase in the country’s orangutan population, warning that the…
Scientists say they have solved the mystery behind the periodic disappearance and reappearance of the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) across huge areas of central and South America. A new study…
A rare gecko no larger than a paperclip is making a comeback in the Caribbean, thanks to conservation efforts by environmental groups and the government. The Union Island gecko (Gonatodes…
Sea turtles lumber from ocean to shore to lay their eggs in the sand. In some places, this effort is protected by humans who patrol beaches on foot, warding off…
Look up what drives deforestation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the results are many: trade with countries like China and the EU, mining to satisfy growing demand for…
The world’s largest rainforest makes its own weather. Up to half of all the rainfall in the Amazon comes from the forest itself, as moisture is recycled from the trees…
On the northern tip of Madagascar, scientists have described eight new-to-science species of geckos, all about the length of your thumb. For decades, scientists have studied the Lygodactylus madagascariensis species…
Money for conservation is limited, and deciding how to prioritize spending raises questions not only about where to channel resources but also when and in what order. Listen to an…
Just weeks after visiting a patch of Malaysian rainforest, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler learned it had been logged for wood chips to supply a paper plant. A teenager at…
Researchers have described six species of ferns new to science from the tropical forests of Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, all in the genus Danaea. “The described species are no tiny…
News articles and opinion pieces have popped up in the pages of different Costa Rican newspapers over the past several years, warning of the imminent collapse of Corcovado National Park,…
JAKARTA — For decades, oil palm farmers in Indonesia have drained — and destroyed — tropical peatlands on the basis that the crop doesn’t grow well in the boggy soil.…
While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation,…
A frog that looks like chocolate, a resplendent rainbow fish, and 14 Sulawesi shrews were added to a growing list of “new to science” species over the past few months.…
The Amazon Rainforest is resilient: the largest rainforest on the planet has been around for at least 55 million years, surviving repeated ice ages and warming. But human impacts, combined…
In November 2011, when a pregnant beaked whale drifted ashore on New Zealand’s Waiatoto Spit, Ramari Stewart, an Indigenous whale watcher, noticed that the whale looked slightly different to those…
Animals that eat fruit and spread the seeds in their droppings offer an all-inclusive transportation service for half the world’s flora. But as more seed-dispersing birds and mammals die off…
Up in the trees of a misty sky island, folded into the foliage, a tiny rainfrog bears the name of a climate giant. The new-to-science species, found on a mountain…
For the Amazon, 2021 was yet another year under the pandemic where the onslaught against nature never seemed to end. Deforestation continues, surging at year’s end Deforestation continued in the…
With humans sending probes to Mars and the sun, one might think we’ve already explored the full extent of our own planet. But scientists say we’ve only begun to find…
In November 2020, Peruvian cacao company Tamshi filed a lawsuit against Mongabay Latam staff reporter Yvette Sierra Praeli for “aggravated defamation” over her reporting of a government investigation into the…
Cattle ranchers in the U.S. will soon have a systematic way of measuring the ecological impact that their industry has on rangeland ecosystems across the country. A new study published…
JAKARTA — Years of deforestation and mining have devastated a wetland of international importance in Papua New Guinea, which, if left unchecked, could lead to the collapse of the ecosystem,…
Researchers have described 12 new gecko species from India’s Western Ghats mountains, 10 of which are found nowhere else on Earth. One particularly stealth gecko, described as “nearly impossible to…
It’s not unusual to see some rivers running black in Venezuela, or for fishermen to return home scraping dark sludge off their boots. Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of government…
