For years, monitoring water levels in the semiarid Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya was a tedious task. Team members would travel the 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the main office…
High-quality data journalism serves as a powerful tool in elucidating complex environmental issues, transforming raw data into compelling narratives that illuminate the hidden stories behind the numbers. By employing rigorous…
One in five fish sold globally is caught illegally, according to C4ADS, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that tracks illicit trade networks. That’s between 11 million and 26 million metric…
Last month, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the receipt of a $24 million donation to catalyze the field of conservation bioacoustics, which uses sound data to to understand and…
It started in October 2017. A swarm of microscopic algae called Karenia brevis amassed in the waters off Florida’s southwest coast, turning the ocean a rust-red hue. The algae, which…
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been the year of the climate commitment, with a number of companies and governments announcing plans to reduce carbon emissions by a specified level…
Catching a caribou isn’t easy. In some locations, it involves flying around in helicopters, shooting the animal with a tranquilizer dart, making it safely to the ground, and placing a…
This was meant to be a moment of triumph in the long battle to save the world’s forests. The year when the bold commitment hundreds of companies made to eliminate…
Rare plant species are far more likely to go extinct than common species, yet we know surprisingly little about global species abundance. Most efforts to quantify species abundance focus on…
New research finds that nearly one-third — 31.7 percent — of tropical Africa’s vascular plant species might be at risk of going extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s…
The end of the 2010s will be remembered as the time when the world realized that we are in the midst of a global biodiversity crisis, as illustrated by the…
In a press conference yesterday, UN secretary general António Guterres announced that July 2019 was the hottest month on record. Data for the month is still being collected, but July…
Conservationists are increasingly looking toward technology for aid. We are now better able to monitor forest change as result of deforestation or climate change, survey inaccessible areas for rare species…
At first glance, the news seems good: global tropical deforestation declined for the second year in a row, according to new satellite data. But digging in a little deeper reveals…
What kinds of animals and plants are people interested in? When does their interest spike? Wikipedia may hold some answers, a new study has found. As a free and open-access…
In a classic poem, an ancient mariner finds himself haunted by the albatross he killed. Two hundred years after Samuel Coleridge penned that poem, albatrosses still follow fishing ships. But…
The bill to train two dogs to guard a penguin colony: $18,000. Set up camera traps in one of the world’s most remote, understudied rainforests in New Guinea: $16,000. Build…
If you know the animals in your neighborhood but not the plants, you’re not alone. Scientists have documented nearly 400,000 plant species and expect to identify many more. But unlike…
Imagine being able to know how many individual organisms occur at any given time across areas as large as whole continents or even the entire globe. Though satellites may one…
The iNaturalist species data- and image-sharing platform reached a milestone earlier this month with its one millionth observer. The platform consists of a mobile app and corresponding website that help…
As early as 2009-10, researchers were looking at Twitter data mining as a way to predict the incidence of flu. At the time, the H1N1 virus, or “swine flu,” had…
Changing climate has already affected where some species live. To determine how changes in temperature and rainfall patterns may affect a given plant or animal, researchers need to know where…
Coral reef conservation efforts will soon get a major boost with a global monitoring system that will detect physical changes in coral cover at high resolution on a daily basis,…
New technologies are generating far more information than ever before to help scientists assess and predict the health and behavior of species and ecosystems, as well as the threats they…
An unlikely group of experts have teamed up to apply software developed to find distant stars to help solve problems in conservation ecology. The “astro-ecology” project at Liverpool Johns Moores…
What if we had a public library for scientific data? The proliferation of sensors monitoring the Earth—from space to planes, drones, vehicles, park rangers, camera traps, and even animal tracking…
Technology above the clouds is helping scientists study sharks beneath the waves. A new initiative combines shark movement data with publicly available vessel identification data—both transmitted to researchers via satellite—to…
Nature’s Barcodes In 1974, a grocery item with the now universal black and white barcode was scanned for the first time. This invention streamlined the check-out process and has forever…
In the eighth grade, at an age most boys spend their time outside school watching sports and playing videogames, Kalev Leetaru was delving into large-scale web mining and founding his first web company. With…
By combining wildlife tracking data with information from satellites, Mark Hebblewhite pushes the boundaries of wildlife biology to uncover new information about the complex interplay among wolves, large ungulates such as elk and caribou and the ever-expanding human footprint.
