Planting trees is a vital strategy to combat both climate change and the biodiversity crisis. As forests grow, they sponge carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provide renewed habitat for…
A couple of years ago, Sarah Venter wrote an article gently picking apart alarm over the specter of Africa's iconic baobabs dying off due to climate change. Her review found…
Brazil bet big on a mega river dam using old data, but climate change is leaving its massive turbines high and dry.
The hill people of Bangladesh have been moving to profitable cash crops for the last couple of decades, dropping traditional agricultural practices. However, the economic gain soon turned into ecological…
Many view conservation as a ledger of discrete gains—acres saved or species rebounded—but for Gary Tabor, the more vital metric is architecture. He focuses on systems that hold when pressure…
In most forests, a visitor’s eye is trained on what can be reached. The trunk can be measured. The leaves can be plucked. A specimen can be pressed, labeled, and…
COLOMBO — Cricket is more than a sport in Sri Lanka. It is woven into the country’s postindependence identity, a unifying passion that cuts across class, ethnicity and geography. Yet…
In India, arguments about nature are often treated as friction in the path of progress. Madhav Gadgil insisted they were arguments about power: who gets to decide what happens to…
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 early 2000s, José Juan Flores Martínez was studying for a bachelor’s degree in biology and working as a volunteer in a program designed to control invasive rodents on…
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…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s misty hill country, a hub for nature-based tourism, is currently grappling with the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah. Landslides, flash floods and damaged infrastructure have disrupted the…
High in the Andes, Polylepis trees, with their stunted gnarled trunks and twisted limbs, cling to steep mountain slopes, boulder fields and sheltered ravines. Growing at altitudes of up to…
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…
COLOMBO — Two weeks after Cyclone Ditwah struck Sri Lanka, the actual environmental cost of the disaster remains largely unknown, as immediate priorities were human safety, relief and recovery. The…
It’s a fundamental question for ecologists in this age: How are biodiversity losses reshaping how ecosystems function? A recent study quantifies the impact of biodiversity and abundance losses on ecological…
When elephant biologist Seema Lokhandwala, with the Elephants Acoustic Project, visited a village near Balipara in India’s Assam state, as part of her fieldwork in December 2015, she witnessed firsthand…
The guiña, a small cat species found only in Chile and northern Argentina, has just been reclassified as of least concern by the IUCN. Until recently it was listed as…
Josep “Pep” Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, says he believes countries large and small need to think twice before pledging to collectively plant billions of trees as…
The island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe has taken a significant step in marine conservation, announcing that it will establish eight marine protected areas in its coastal waters. The…
Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and…
COLOMBO — In 2012, Sri Lanka’s National Red List delivered a grim verdict on endemic Pini- Beraliya, the towering dipterocarp Doona ovalifolia (syn. Shorea ovalifolia) tree by categorizing it as…
MANNAR, Sri Lanka — Under the blanket of darkness, giant trucks rumbled through the narrow roads of Sri Lanka’s Mannar district, their headlights cutting through the night. On their trailers…
KATHMANDU — Nayaram Sunar vividly remembers the day at the end of monsoon season in 2019, when rain was pouring in relentlessly on his sister’s corn field in the village…
COLOMBO — As darkness settled over Colombo on Aug. 3, a small group of young men, led by a zoology professor, slipped quietly into Sri Lanka’s largest cemetery, Borella Kanatte,…
When the sheep were removed, the páramo — high-altitude ecosystems in the Andes — started to heal. Without their waste, water quality improved. Without their hooves compacting the soil, plants…
The phrase malezi mema in Comorian loosely translates to “parenting well.” A fishers’ group of the same name on the island of Anjouan in Comoros is trying to provide a…
Conservationists snapped images of two small wildcat species in Pakistan earlier this year: an Asiatic caracal (Caracal caracal schimitzi) and a sand cat (Felis margarita) — both which are incredibly…
As Africa’s environment ministers meet this week in Nairobi, Kenya, for the 20th African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF)is touting its decades of support…
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…
COLOMBO — The Deduru Oya reservoir in northwestern Sri Lanka has long been a favorite fishing spot for angler Ishanka Dissanayaka. In mid-June, he returned to the reservoir for a…
In a world full of bad news, there’s been good news in whale conservation. Many of the great whales are coming back. In fact, some populations have been recovering faster…
