Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are finding a new place to roam in the rapidly changing Arctic Ocean. Though Indigenous people in the region have seen the whales, also known as…
In the icy waters surrounding Antarctica, small shrimp-like crustaceans called krill (Euphausia superba) swim in swarms of trillions, forming a biomass larger than the entire human population. Scientists knew these…
In the forest's fecund gloom, José Muchavisoy leads the guardians of the territory as they scan the undergrowth for trails left by their target. Strangely splayed paw prints, dung among…
In 2018, Han Xue-song, then a researcher with the Beijing-based Shan Shui Conservation Center, was in the Sanjiangyuan region on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, surveying black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis). At an…
JAKARTA — In Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, conservation groups and authorities have built canopy bridges that stitch back together primate habitat, including for orangutans, that were fragmented by roads over…
There’s a theory about what happens when a big cat sets up shop in a forest, and it’s at the center of one of the biggest fights in ecology today.…
Few scientists exclusively study the jaguarundi, Latin America’s least studied wildcat. So those that do are reaching out to other researchers, governments, NGOs and even via social media to pool data, model it, and conserve the species.
Southeast Asia’s endangered flat-headed cat is rarely seen or photographed, and not a lot is known about it, making conservation planning difficult. Using eDNA and other new tools may help change that.
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Every weekend between January 2022 and December 2023, members of the nongovernmental organization Ferme Don de Dieu (FDD) planted trees on farmland in Yolo…
PORTEIRINHA, Minas Gerais — Beneath the shade of the umbu tree, Maria Neves tells Maria José that ripe umbu fruit is like a woman on the brink of giving birth:…
TOKYO — The train to the farm rose from Tokyo’s labyrinthine subway network, revealing a hodgepodge of gray and tan buildings stretched on either side. The world’s largest metropolitan area,…
In 2024, Latin America’s tiger cat, previously recognized as two species, was determined by scientists to be three species — a taxonomic reshuffling that has major conservation implications for these small cats.
While wind turbines and solar panels multiply across the Brazilian dry forests, Tião Alves insists on tin windmills and PET bottle-based heaters. "Backcountry technology," as he defines it, arguing that…
A paper generated by the Merz Institute, an Aotearoa New Zealand-based research institute, and published in the journal Science Progress in 2023, hypothesizes that the environmental crises our planet faces…
In the municipality of Camocim, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, the fishing village of Praia do Xavier was erased from the map. Or at least that’s how it appeared on the…
The ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana has it that Hanuman was a mighty ape god who marshaled an army to build a bridge linking northern Sri Lanka’s Mannar region with South…
For more than 200 million years, the ancient Valdivian Temperate Forest in southwestern Chile has been a refuge for plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. This global…
The Mexico-U.S. border wall has interrupted the ecological connectivity of a nature reserve that’s a World Heritage Site, and should be addressed to remedy the situation, according to UNESCO. Without…
UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — Everything is growing in Perpétua's grove now. "Can you see? This is avocado; over there, papaya. This year I already got acerola. We plant a little…
The diminutive Karoo dwarf tortoise (Chersobius boulengeri) may play an outsized role as gardener in its arid South African habitat. Researchers gathered droppings of the miniature species — this endangered…
The world’s two worst nuclear accidents, in Ukraine and Japan, along with the human exclusion zones around them, are informing scientists about radiation effects, and how ecosystems evolve with less pressure from people.
The sand cat is small, elusive and adapted to life in some of Earth’s most inhospitable deserts — that makes it hard to study and conserve, with lots of unknowns about its behaviors and populations across its range.
UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — In the backlands of northern Bahia state, nobody ever thought about putting up a fence in the woods. According to the tradition that governs fundo de…
This story is the first part of a Mongabay series titled “Climate Crisis in Cape Horn” that won the Inter American Press Association Award for Excellence in Journalism in the…
The government of New Caledonia recently announced that it would highly protect 10% of its ocean to safeguard ecologically important marine areas for sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, whales and seabirds.…
Japan is home to two rare subspecies of leopard cat, one found only on Iriomote Island and the other on Tsushima Island. Neither larger than a housecat, each subspecies has…
NOVA XAVANTINA, Brazil — This past July, 15 Indigenous women made the thousand-mile journey from their home of Rolim de Moura, in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Rondônia, east to…
CAPE TOWN — The endangered African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) could be extinct in the wild in just over a decade. To protect the bird’s food supply and slow its population…
"One of the greatest pleasures I had when I came here was telling my friends, 'Today I planted 5,000 fig tree seeds,'" says Yacov Kilsztajn. "Planting seeds here at the…
The Amazon Rainforest — together with other forests around the globe — lies at the center of concern over climate changes inside Brazil and worldwide. Yet little is studied and…
“This here is really great. I feel so good! I’m not stressed, and I’m not sad. When I’m here in the garden, everything is good,” says Waldir Francisco de Almeida,…
Each year from June to August, it's tapir hunting season in Suriname, the only country in South America that allows hunting the animal, which already faces a host of other…
