As 2019 melt season nears end, 40 years of satellite data reveal a rapidly warming polar region, with no end in sight, plus multiple impacts for a changing planet. This story has been updated.
Subsidizing burning wood for energy as having zero emissions puts us at risk of overshooting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.
In a recently published study, Canadian researchers monitored the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers (Pekania pennanti), a member of the weasel family, across a terrain of over 700 protected areas…
The prospect of monitoring every vessel at sea in real time has moved a step closer to reality as a new generation of surveillance satellites takes to the skies. The…
In September 2014, Nepali zoologist Madhu Chetri asked his professor Morten Odden a strange question during their fieldwork. "Are you tired?" he asked Odden as the duo from the Inland…
High heat and conditioning throughout this year’s melt season put a hurting on Arctic sea ice, but it may still take big storms or more heat to break 2012 extent record.
A New Zealand-based research team assessing the utility of small, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to survey and study humpback whales determined that video data collected from a UAV improved…
Brazil’s Bolsonaro government, angered over rising Amazon deforestation statistics, has fired the head of INPE, Brazil’s highly regarded satellite monitoring program.
Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and CALeDNA have developed a toolkit designed to quickly identify the species in a biological community by simultaneously analyzing the environmental…
Baby whales, like all young mammals, rely on their mother’s milk for their early development. A new video follows a nursing humpback whale and her calf and takes the calf’s…
The Con X Tech Prize just announced its second round will be funding 20 finalists each with $3,500 to create their first prototypes. Some 150 teams submitted ideas that use…
Bolsonaro officials say Brazilian Amazon deforestation data is being manipulated, but offer no evidence. Early data, though not definitive, shows a 2019 increase in deforestation.
A very hot Arctic spring has caused sea ice volume to fall rapidly to a new record, putting 2019 in position to challenge 2012 for lowest ice volume and extent this September.
Marine biologists survey fish assemblages and their associated habitat to understand the ecosystem of a place, compare fish communities over time or in response to changes in management, and examine…
When collecting a DNA sample from a species in the wild just isn’t possible — it’s elusive, it may disturb the animal, or a host of other reasons — field…
Feeding aquatic sponges could provide biologists with unexpected underwater data collection assistance. Sponges (phylum Porifera) are immobile aquatic animals that eat by filtering out food particles from the water around…
The Angolan government has pledged $60 million to clear landmines in two national parks that form part of southern Africa’s highly biodiverse Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. The country’s environment minister,…
The UK and EU say they plan to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, even as both pursue plans to burn massive amounts of carbon-producing wood pellets.
Commercial agriculture drives some 40 percent of deforestation in the tropics, as suppliers clear forest to plant soy, oil palm, rubber, and cacao or to raise beef cattle. More than…
When the British explorer James Cook circumnavigated the islands that he would later call New Zealand in 1769, he described the birdsong on the densely forested archipelago as “deafening.” One…
