Restoration News

Land degradation – the deterioration or loss of the productive capacity of land – is progressing at an alarming rate. Globally, over a fifth of the total land area has…

Ida Yellowman stood at the top of Muley Point, seeing memories in every cardinal direction. To the north was Bears Ears and the Abajo Mountains, rock-strewn landscape where she first…

Birds, bats, elephants, apes, rodents and many other animal species spread plant seeds throughout the world. But as those animal populations diminish, so do the plants that rely on wildlife to shift their range, especially as climate change worsens.

An international team of scientists studying the distribution and threats facing some of South and Southeast Asia’s most economically important tree species has confirmed that current environmental protections fail to…

In 1993, the democratically elected president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated in a coup. At the time, the country’s democratic institutions were still only three months old. The incident…

The Atlantic Rainforest of the Northeast Project plans to reforest 70 hectares (173 acres) in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas by 2023. Monitoring in Pernambuco’s Serra do Urubu region has shown an increase in bird diversity, from 105 species recorded in 2005, to 287 in 2021. Despite the progress being made, the situation remains fragile, with seven bird species having gone extinct in the Atlantic Forest in recent decades, and a strong tradition of keeping birds in cages still persisting.

In the past decade, the European bison (Bison bonasus) has made a comeback in Central and Eastern Europe. Hunters had killed the last known bison in the region nearly a…

Traditional and Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are joining with scientists to successfully rewild mining-degraded peatlands and other sites.

Each morning as the sun rises into the sky, ranger Donovan Wright stands on the outskirts of Blean Woods in the United Kingdom. The ancient woodland in southern England covers…

SHOUF BIOSPHERE RESERVE, Lebanon — Late afternoon light falls across Talal Riman’s weathered face as he stands under the ancient cedars he’s tended for almost three decades in Lebanon’s Shouf…

Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park has become a laboratory for the reintroduction of locally extinct species. A study shows that, of the 33 species of large and medium-sized mammals that used to occur in the park area, only 11 remain today.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, struck Puerto Rico. The hurricane dried up four basin mangrove forests in the island’s northeast, leaving behind an urgent need for restoration,…

Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…

Panama is embracing a host of forest restoration and reforestation solutions aimed at meeting its Paris climate agreement carbon reduction goals, including agroforestry and incentivizing the planting of teak plantations.

High above sea level on the central Greek mountain of Oiti, the mythological place of Hercules’ funeral, snow melts in the springtime. As the soil becomes wet, grasses start growing…

Restoration initiatives are slowly making a mark on the Atlantic Forest, a Brazilian biome that has been reduced to about a quarter of its original area. Brazil has made global commitments to restore tens of millions of hectares of forest by 2030, but the much smaller programs underway in the Atlantic Forest show country is still unable to monitor restoration efforts effectively.

We set out from the town of Extrema, in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle at 9 a.m. on a Monday. Driving beneath a mountainous vista and blue…

The reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 triggered a cascade of knock-on effects. The wolves kept herbivores like elk in check and on the move, reducing…

In 2007, scientists at the Conservation Land Trust, now known as the Rewilding Foundation, released a giant anteater couple into the wild as part of a new reintroduction program. While…

The “Black Summer” bushfires burned an area the size of the U.K. in Australia in 2019-20, forcing foresters to reconsider the meaning of forest resilience and how best to restore forests as climate change and drought intensify.

An agreement for the rights to the natural capital covering 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) in Malaysian Borneo for the next 100 years “in its present form is legally…

Cecilia Rivas remembers Tukupu as a place to live freely. The dwellings of the Indigenous Kariña community, spread out under the shade of the trees in the Imataca Forest Reserve,…

JAKARTA — Indonesia has recorded mixed progress in its dual programs of restoring tropical peatlands and mangroves, acknowledging that achieving the latter goal will be far more challenging than for…

Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of…

For several weeks in 2015, the sound of chainsaws cutting down trees was incessant in the Angangueo municipality in the Mexican state of Michoacán. When a group of people tried…

For the uninitiated, the first mouthful of the Hawaiian red algae known as limu kohu (Asparagopsis taxiformis) may be an unpleasant one: intensely iodine-rich and bitter, with all the marine…

DENPASAR/JAKARTA — The Indonesian government plans to have a network of dozens of villages with aquaculture farms by the end of the year, in a bid to spur the post-pandemic…

TANAKEKE ISLANDS, Indonesia — Wading through a mangrove swamp in the coastal waters of Indonesia’s Tanakeke Islands, Hayati wiped the sweat from her brow and tried her best to keep…

2021 was a year where tropical forests featured more prominently in global headlines than normal thanks to rising recognition of the role they play in addressing climate change and biodiversity…

The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a…

The world has long monitored global deforestation, but tracking ecosystem restoration is a more subtle, challenging process, needing metrics for long-term success, carbon storage, biodiversity and local economy benefits.

The story of the American bison is both tragic and uplifting. Once dappling the prairies of North America in the tens of millions, hunting winnowed the number to perhaps a…