In 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest opened its doors and challenged the world to develop new biodiversity assessment technologies by offering a $10 million prize for the best one. The consequent mobilization will extend…
Twice a year, thousands of members of South Africa’s Nazareth Baptist Church clothe themselves in spots and walk to their holy grounds in KwaZulu-Natal province to take up a dance.…
When Sellemah was a girl, in the days when the Tl’ches archipelago was still inhabited, the tide pools were full of urchins. The Songhees Nation elder, who also goes by the…
Though other stories might have dominated the headlines, 2020 was a year of tremendous change in land use and land cover. Massive fires burned across Australia, the Amazon, and the…
All told, this was a pretty bleak year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought tragedy and confusion; fires razed parts of Australia, the Amazon, and the Western U.S.; and the world is…
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been the year of the climate commitment, with a number of companies and governments announcing plans to reduce carbon emissions by a specified level…
The Ocean Cleanup is a highly touted nonprofit with the ambitious goal of cleaning up 90 percent of the ocean’s plastic. In reality, the initiative’s impact on the world's floating…
In 2016, conservation biologist Holly O’Donnell was striding through the Amazon rainforest in southwestern Peru, recording every mammal she saw or heard while performing a line transect survey for the…
The CMA CGM Brazil, a huge cargo freighter carrying more than 15,000 containers, powered through the Atlantic Ocean, headed for New York City. North of Nantucket, it entered what’s known…
On a humid morning in 2019, Lily Xu watched as a patrolling ranger driving a motorbike down a remote forest road in Cambodia signaled his group to stop and pull…
Today, maps are a critical part of nearly all place-based conservation efforts. Maps enable scientists and conservation practitioners to identify where they operate, allocate resources, organize and present data, and…
This week, scientists from James Cook University in Australia announced the discovery of a previously unknown detached coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef. It was the first new reef…
Early on the morning of Sept. 16, 2018, an olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) hauled herself out of the ocean along a beach on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. Moving…
Lured with watermelon, Harapan, a 13-year-old captive Sumatran rhino moseyed into a metal-framed enclosure rigged with 24 cameras. When he stepped in front of the lenses, all of the cameras…
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — To achieve its ambitious large-scale reforestation goals, Madagascar is turning to the sky. The country will use drones to plant trees in isolated areas. The plan is…
Unless you’re thinking of the colorful characters in the movie Finding Nemo, the first word you think of for coral reef fish is probably not “social.” But after spending a…
It’s fall in Nunavut, Canada, and Richard Kakk is hunting caribou. Snow that started in September has placed him in a landscape of white, broken only by the ice-crusted slate…
Last recorded in 1968, Megaelosia bocainensis, a frog known for its rounded snout and granular skin, was thought extinct until researchers tracked down its environmental DNA in Brazil’s São Paulo state.
When the elephant arrived in the night, on the hunt for sugarcane, Uthorn Kanthong was waiting for him. Like many of his neighbors, the 69-year-old Thai farmer had taken to…
MANILA — In the Philippines, it’s normal for neighbors to share their food, and — since most areas are still under a form of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic…
In the late 1990s, a Yale ecologist named Oswald Schmitz and his students made an interesting discovery by gluing spiders’ mouths shut. Schmitz’s team placed the glued spiders in enclosed…
Two liters of seawater, or about half a gallon. That’s all that’s needed to detect the presence of sharks in the ocean, according to a new study. A group of…
The world watched in horror as the Amazon burned in 2019, windblown smoke darkening the sky over far-off São Paulo, Brazil. The ability to predict where fires are likely to…
The global spread of social media has created unparalleled opportunities for wildlife traffickers to advertise their illicit wares to potential buyers around the world. Traffickers can use platforms like Facebook…
It’s a warm May morning in 2015, and beneath a chorus of birds and insects, a small gray-brown dog plops down in front of a camera perched in the Amazon…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the smallest tiger subspecies on Earth: the…
In an episode of the Netflix dystopian sci-fi show “Black Mirror,” artificial bees have been deployed to pollinate the world’s plants after a massive pollinator extinction. A great idea, until…
Chinese “dark fleets” illegally fished a $440 million haul of the squid species Todarodes pacificus in North Korean waters during 2017 and 2018, according to a study published today in…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the largest species of martens in Asia.…
Using the customizable app ForestLink, traditional forest guardians (people living within and around the forest) can send near-real-time, geo-tagged alerts about illegal logging and mining activities to authorities and other…
