“Why on earth would anyone give up working on tigers to focus on freshwater fish?” is the question I am asked most frequently since becoming the Executive Director of Shoal,…
Giraffes have to search a wider area for food and water when people live nearby, according to a recent study. “Giraffes are huge browsing animals that live in African savanna…
Hyperbolic headlines can be like catnip for newspaper editors. So when a local fisher hauls in what looks like a record-breaking catch, it often makes news. But a recent study…
Ecologists know that when we humans start tugging at the threads of a food web, the unraveling that results is often catastrophic to the connected species, paving the way for…
Blue whales in the northern Pacific Ocean use their memories to guide them to the best feeding spots, instead of seeking out the locations of shorter-term surges in prey, a…
More young birds survived near a road through a Thai forest than those living deeper in the forest where more predators lurked, researchers found during a recent study. The disruptive…
Ecosystems in their natural state are disappearing quickly around the globe. On that most scientists agree. But how to stem those losses through conservation is hotly debated. Many believe that…
Thirteen conservation organizations have banded together to ask policymakers to protect the world’s last wilderness areas by setting aside nearly one-third of the Earth for conservation. “The planet is losing…
Many pollinator insect species like bees, butterflies, and hoverflies are on the decline, due in large part to habitat destruction driven by conversion of land to agricultural fields and urbanization.…
On today’s episode, we talk with the Director General of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Inger Andersen. Listen here: Founded in 1948 and headquartered in…
It was an ambitious project from the start: to capture the Congo Basin rainforest in the pages of a book. Stretching across an area larger than Saudi Arabia, the world’s…
Several years ago, my colleague Richard York and I were sitting outside on a Eugene, Oregon patio discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s then-new book, The Sixth Extinction, and we came to an…
A 40-year conservation effort on the remote Juruá River in Brazil’s Amazonas state cut turtle poaching to 2 percent, while also conserving bird, river dolphin and other species too: study.
The white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), a hairy, pig-like mammal that once lived throughout the forests of Central and South America, now only skitters around in 13 percent of its former…
The current mass extinction is eliminating whole branches of the mammal tree of life, which will take millions of years to replace, according to a recent study. Some researchers suggest…
Ivory, pangolin scales, bear bile: Rachel Nuwer, author of the new book “Poached,” saw it all as she trekked from rainforests to posh restaurants on the trail of wildlife traffickers.
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — As policymakers, conservation scientists and the global media geared up to attend U.N. climate talks in Poland, discussions on another environment-related global treaty were quietly…
In my lifetime, global wildlife populations have seen an overall decline of more than half. That’s a statement of such enormity that it’s hard to process. The evidence comes from…
A new map plots out the last known refuges of hundreds of highly threatened species around the world. The assessment updates work done by the Alliance for Zero Extinction, or…
African leaders came together on Nov. 13 to back the restoration of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of degraded ecosystems ahead of the start of the U.N. Biodiversity Conference.…
On this episode, a progress report on the Half-Earth Project direct from legendary conservation biologist E.O. Wilson. Listen here: The Half-Earth Project recently held an event at the American…
A prominent African wildlife conservation NGO has committed $25 million to help protect iconic fauna from poaching and habitat loss across the continent by investing in African institutions and people.…
New research finds that one-third of critical jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco, South America’s largest tropical dry forest, has been lost since the mid-1980s. According to the study, led…
Frogs in a tropical forest in Panama are doing better than scientists believed after a devastating fungus slashed population numbers and wiped out entire species about a decade ago. In…
Research has shown that a sixth mass extinction event is underway and largely driven by human activities. With the global population set to balloon to 10 billion people by 2050,…
South America’s Atlantic Forest was once home to an “exuberant … megadiverse” swath of animal and plant life, according to ecologist Juliano Bogoni. But in a paper published in the…
Biologist Joel Berger endures extreme conditions to study muskoxen and learn about the opportunities — and limits — of behavioral flexibility in a fast changing climate.
Tigers and other wildlife in Peninsular Malaysia now have a new refuge, as the state government of Terengganu recently axed plans to log more than 100 square kilometers (39 square…
On this episode we welcome the godfather of biodiversity, Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, to discuss some of the most important environmental issues we’re currently facing and why he believes the next…
More isolated oceanic islands harbor fewer native species due to the fact that plants and animals are less capable of naturally dispersing to and colonizing those islands. This is known…