Ever since a deadly strain of avian influenza, H5N1, killed some 17,000 southern elephant seal pups on South American coastlines in 2023 and 2024, researchers and public officials have kept…
Agriculture is on the cusp of its most profound transformation in a century. Just as the Green Revolution shifted farming from sun and soil to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, we…
In California’s interior, a long, straight aqueduct carries snowmelt south to a city that grew as if water were a birthright. Along the way it passes a valley that was…
Doug McConnell spent much of his adult life doing something that sounds simple and is not: he helped people look closely at the places where they lived. For decades he…
Why Mongabay is reporting on California’s biodiversity Mongabay’s coverage of biodiversity has long been associated with tropical forests and far-flung frontiers. Yet California—wealthy, populous, and intensively studied—presents a different…
In the forests of the Sierra Nevada, the black-backed woodpecker is without parallel. The bird appears almost born of fire, thriving on the flames that flicker through California’s coniferous forests…
The Van Eck Forest in northwestern California is home to iconic coast redwood trees, which store more above-ground carbon per acre than any other forest type. The oldest trees can…
In 1888, researchers aboard the R/V Albatross began the world's first concentrated marine research expeditions off California's Pacific coast. The team collected untold plant and animal specimens, including orange cup…
Getting to The Cedars, an ecological preserve in California’s Sonoma county, is a slog. Multiple rivers and creeks must be crossed, and it can be tough going on an often…
The sea otter pup was tiny, probably less than 2 weeks old, alone in Morro Bay on an October morning earlier this year. A kayaker scooped it out of the…
This is the fourth part of Mongabay’s series on the expanding wolf population in California. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. A lone gray wolf (Canis lupus) named…
Following up on a tip to the state’s poaching hotline, game wardens in California rushed to a popular fishing spot, Clifton Court Forebay, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They’d…
This is the third part of Mongabay’s series on the expanding wolf population in California. Read the first and the second parts. In late October, wildlife authorities in the U.S.…
In October, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at California's Otay Mesa border crossing noticed an odd bulge inside a man's pants. Jesse Agus Martinez, a U.S. citizen who…
Christopher C. Grinter has spent much of his life surrounded by insects, though not in the way most people imagine. As Senior Collection Manager of Entomology at the California Academy…
Some revolutions begin not with technology, but with a feeling. For Gregg Treinish, that feeling was guilt. He was spending years on long wilderness expeditions—crossing ranges, sleeping rough, watching the…
California has a way of exaggerating things—mountains, deserts, and egos. But its insects? They take excess to another level. Somewhere between the redwoods and the Salton Sea live perhaps 60,000,…
This is the second part of Mongabay’s series on the expanding wolf population in California. Read the first and the third parts. In May 2025, five counties in northern California…
Earlier this year, 350 endangered mountain yellow-legged frogs hopped into their new home in Bluff Lake in Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains. It’s the latest step in a long-running battle…
In a world defined by extraction, Denica Riadini-Flesch is proving that creation can heal instead. The Indonesian economist-turned-entrepreneur has won UCLA’s 2025 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award for building a…
SAN DIEGO, U.S. — The bluff at La Jolla Cove in San Diego is covered with pelicans and cormorants; below, some two dozen sea lions lounge on a rocky ledge…
Tony Pritzker approaches environmental philanthropy like a patient strategist. A scion of one of America’s best-known business families, he has spent decades moving between boardrooms, laboratories, and community meetings, applying…
Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six…
This is the second installment of Mongabay’s coverage of beaver restoration in California. Read the first story. TÁSMAM KOYÓM, U.S. — “It’s a little wet!” Ben Cunningham shouted over his…
The small, bell-shaped flowers that dangle like gems in dazzling hues of yellow, maroon, purple, brown and white give jewelflowers their name. Yet these plants, from the genera Streptanthus and…
This is the first installment of Mongabay's coverage of beaver restoration in California. Read the second story. CHESTER, Calif. — The pictograph, an ochre-red outline with four paws and an…
FORT BRAGG, U.S. — In 2024, I was scuba diving in Northern California’s Casper Cove where the Watermen’s Alliance, a group of ex-abalone sports divers, has been culling purple urchins…
This is the first part of Mongabay’s series on the expanding wolf population in California. Read the second and third parts. With its enchanting eyes, powerful jaws, acute senses and…
In early springtime in the Mojave Desert, Joshua trees provide one of the few foods available to many of the wildlife species in this part of the southwestern U.S. Stretching…
In southern California’s Coachella Valley, pale sand dunes sprawl under the desert sun, shifting and re-forming in the wind. In dry years, lone shrubs dot the dunes. But the landscape…
KLAMATH, California — The Pacific Ocean fog hung densely over the narrow mouth of the Klamath River in this coastal rainforest in northern California. Redwood, Douglas fir and alder disappeared…
In northeastern California, the Upper Pit River undulates through evergreen forests, wet meadows and rugged mountains. It's part of the snow-fed headwaters of the Sacramento River, the largest river in…
