Remember Indiana Jones’ famous line "Snakes! Why’d it have to be snakes?" in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark? That iconic moment has taken on a new twist…
KATHMANDU — Fishing cats are among the most elusive and understudied small cats in the world. They’re also among the most threatened, faced with habitat loss, conflict with humans, and…
An international team of researchers is analysing army ants collected in forests in northeastern Gabon, to better understand zoonotic diseases. According to the World Health Organization, Africa experienced a 63%…
In September 2022, researchers at BC Whales, a Canadian research nonprofit studying cetaceans in the north of British Columbia province, gasped when they saw a drone image of a humpback…
Amazonian lakes sequester carbon dioxide at a rate 39% higher than the rainforest itself. This is according to a 2022 study by researchers from Brazil, Australia, the U.S., France, Portugal,…
KATHMANDU — Long ago, in the ancient kingdom of Kapilavastu, young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who would later become the Buddha, and his cousin Devadatta were honing their archery skills when…
Stephanie Fennessy and her husband have been tagging giraffes in Africa since the early 2000s. The couple initially started out by using modified elephant collars. They later switched to using…
JAKARTA — A quota-based fisheries management system that the Indonesian government introduced earlier this year has already run up against opposition for undermining the role of local authorities and fishing…
If just two Kordofan giraffes are killed each year, the subspecies could be locally extinct in just 15 years within Cameroon's Bénoué National Park. This is according to a new…
While electric vehicles can cut direct emissions, their production supply chain needs to be decarbonized and other environmental impacts addressed. EVs have a long road to travel before being truly sustainable, say experts.
How had we missed this until now? An undersea mountain as tall as three Eiffel Towers. DDT contamination spread across an area of the seabed as large as San Francisco.…
From getting alerts about injured elephants to tracking ones that are straying too close to villages, the Mara Elephant Project has used the EarthRanger platform since 2019 to manage the…
When powered by renewables, EVs can greatly reduce a vehicle’s direct carbon emissions. But experts warn that we need to gauge environmental impacts across the entire automotive supply chain to ensure sustainability.
Mangroves’ capacity to store carbon — up to five times more than upland tropical forests — makes them a powerful natural solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate…
Less than 3% of the world’s oceans are currently protected. Conservationists say that figure needs to hit 30% to prevent major diversity loss and climate change. But marine conservation can…
Freshwater dolphins navigate the waterways of the Amazon Basin. In the wet season, water spills from the rivers, flooding parts of the forests. The dolphins go, too, using their exceptionally…
In 2017, a camera installed on the fringes of Corbett Tiger Reserve in northern India photographed an unsuspecting woman. The local forest staff had set up the device discreetly to…
Used as food, pets, medicine and décor, plants and animals across the globe are threatened by international trade. A recent study reveals concerning gaps in trade protections for the most…
Debbie Saunders’s quest to make wildlife tracking more efficient started in the early 2000s. The wild ecologist was studying swift parrots (Lathamus discolor) in Australia and found it challenging to…
“O poplar tree, O poplar tree, how carbon-dense are thy branches …” Trees are a major tool in our fight against climate change by sucking up carbon dioxide, but one…
What do Taylor Swift, Jackie Chan, Adolf Hitler and several Nobel Peace laureates all have in common? Over the past 100 years, they’ve all had plants, animals, or other new-to-science…
Balkan countries contain a large number of mostly wild and free-flowing rivers, which are home to impressive biodiversity but which have become threatened by a wave of hydroelectric dam proposals…
Top tropical ecologists have spent two decades studying the impact of climate change on a single transect in the Peruvian Andes, an area unparalleled in its biodiversity. They find that every species studied there is struggling against warming temperatures.
Nepal’s diverse landscapes, from the lowland Terai Arc to the high Himalayas, are home to more than 200 mammal species. Beyond the iconic creatures like tigers and rhinos are the…
JAKARTA — Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range,…
International demand for soybeans and corn has turned the South American plains into an economic pillar for countries like Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. But all of that activity also…
COLOMBO — Fireflies, with their bioluminescent rears, are fascinating species that appeal to people’s imaginations, especially those of children. In Sri Lanka, the first systematic study of fireflies was carried…
It was supposed to be a night like any other. Luis Crespo and his team would walk the beach of Maunabo, Puerto Rico, looking for leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea).…
Seed-sowing drones and the latest biotechnology could help restore degraded forests at an unprecedented scale — a high-tech nature-based climate solution already at work, and one that shows tremendous promise.
Costa Rica went from having one of the highest rates of deforestation in the 1980s to becoming the first nation to reverse tropical deforestation. While numerous factors led to this…