Monitoring News

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…

Though the trend can still change, Arctic sea ice extent could be on track for a record melt year, impacting the jet stream and bringing more extreme weather to the U.S. and world.

In mid-May Chile finalized an agreement to publicly share proprietary data from its satellite system for monitoring fishing boats, known as a Vessel Monitoring System. The country will share the…

JAKARTA — Many of the fishing vessels operating in Indonesia’s waters at night do so undetected, masking what could be illegal fishing on a massive scale, according to a new…

Any aquarist who has tried to grow a variety of the colorful Acropora coral in a hobby tank knows how delicate they are – “not for beginners.” And yet this…

Faster and cheaper Surveying and studying coral takes a lot of work. It’s usually done manually, which requires wet suits and air tanks and SCUBA gear and people. But it’s…