How hot are the desert tortoises getting? iButtons help find the answer
A swanky iPhone or a sleek new iPad might sound like a perfect holiday gift for many. Tom Radzio feels the same joy when he retrieves an iButton and downloads…
NASA satellites reveal restoration power of beavers
If humans went extinct tomorrow, who would rule the world? Beavers. Well, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. These tree-felling, water-slowing, wetland-creating rodent engineers have a massive impact wherever they…
With fewer birds seen on farms, scientists try listening for them
Growing up, Adam Dixon couldn't swim or fish in the Arkansas River which flowed through his town of Derby in Kansas. Agricultural runoff, along with industrial activities, heavily impacted the…
In the chain of species extinctions, AI can predict the next link to break
About 100 years ago, a predator control program at Yellowstone National Park drove the wolves native to the region extinct. That kicked off the gradual deterioration of the entire ecosystem.…
Where are the giraffes hiding? Predictive tracking tech points the way
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…
To protect the oceans, we must map them (commentary)
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.…
Wildlife management platform EarthRanger goes mobile with new app
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…
Zika, dengue transmission expected to rise with climate change
A new study foresees a 20% increase in cases of viruses like dengue, Zika and chikungunya over the next 30 years due to climate change. Higher temperatures are already causing the diseases carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito to spread in cooler regions like southern Brazil and southern Europe.
Machine learning helps researchers identify underground fungal networks
Justin Stewart left for Mount Chimborazo in August 2022 to collect fungal samples from the Ecuadoran volcano at an elevation of 4,000 meters, or about 13,000 feet. Given that vegetation…
AI unlocks secrets of Amazon river dolphins’ behavior, no tagging required
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…
‘Immense potential’ in tech: Q&A with Wildlife Drones CEO Debbie Saunders
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…
XPRIZE Rainforest finalists named for top conservation technology award
Conservation technologies like drones, remote sensing and machine learning have a massive role to play in aiding the work of conservation scientists and helping policymakers devise better-informed decisions about where…
Virtual fences can benefit both ranchers and wildlife
The old Figlenski Ranch in Washington state’s Tunk Valley is a rugged land of canyons and scrubby sage-brush steppe. This valley with the ranch at its center connects the Cascade…
Tag team effort brings tech to aid leatherback turtle conservation
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).…
Drones improve counts of rare Cao-vit gibbon, identify conservation priorities
Drones flying above the treetops of a limestone forest on the border of Vietnam and China are helping conservationists develop plans to recover one of the world’s rarest primates: the…
Scientists hope to tech the heck out of eDNA sampling with drones, robots
SINGAPORE — A huge drone hums and hovers above the canopy of a tree. Just as one might start to think that the show is over, the action begins. Slowly,…
Sounds of the soil: A new tool for conservation?
For Jake Robinson, Greno Woods was an easy choice. This large, old forest in South Yorkshire county in the U.K. has historically undergone timber harvesting, quarrying and fires. Plantations of…
Air pollution sensors found to store crucial biodiversity data
It seems a cache of biodiversity data was hiding in plain sight all along. In the midst of hazardous particulate matter trapped in the filters of two air quality monitoring…
Meet the tech projects competing for a $10m prize to save rainforests
SINGAPORE — Macaques look on from trees as a round of applause breaks out. After repeated attempts, a team has managed to fly a drone and drop a sensor platform…
Can an app help Liberian artisanal fishers fight illegal fishing?
ROBERTSPORT and MARSHALL, Liberia — On a mild Friday afternoon, Emmanuel Appleton beamed with smiles as he defied the waves of the Atlantic Ocean and landed his canoe on the…
New digital tool maps blue carbon ecosystems in high resolution
When Hurricane Dorian blazed its trail of destruction through the Bahamas in 2019, it ravaged the country’s mangroves. Almost overnight, coastal communities were deprived of a natural barrier that protected…
Competing for rainforest conservation: Q&A with XPRIZE’s Kevin Marriott
SINGAPORE — It’s been a hectic few weeks for Kevin Marriott. On a humid May morning in Singapore, he shuttles between two locations at the city’s Windsor Nature Park. At…
Woodpeckers for fire recovery? A new online tool tells you how
Imagine a burned forest in California. The charred remains of trees, the soot on the forest floor and the smoke in the air might make it seem like all is…
A Twitter bot tracks meat production in the Brazilian Amazon
Elon Musk may claim to hate them, but can Twitter bots be put to good use? A new tool that aims to monitor and expose deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest…
Targeting 3% of protected areas could accelerate progress on 30×30 goals, says Global Conservation’s Jeff Morgan
Last December, delegates from nearly 200 governments adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada. This agreement aims to conserve 30 percent…
Bioacoustic analysis made easier: Q&A with Rainforest Connection CEO Bourhan Yassin
For scientists and ecologists studying wildlife, listening to the sounds of nature is all the rage now. And with good reason. The exponential growth in the use of audio to…
How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?
Nearly twice the size of Africa, the North Pacific seems to be endless. But somewhere in that vast ocean, 30 eastern North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica) live their lives,…
The more degraded a forest, the quieter its wildlife, new study shows
Tropical forests awaken the senses. The scent of moist earth, the feel of sticky, humid air, and the sight of an array of colorful life-forms are visceral delights. But perhaps…
Feathered forecast: Tech tools comb weather data for bird migrations
Ask Andrew Farnsworth about the origins of the BirdCast project, and he would describe it as “ancient history.” The year 1999, when the project was conceived, is a far cry…
Return of the GEDI: Space-based, forest carbon-mapping laser array saved
It was down to the wire for the GEDI mission, but it now seems like the force may have prevailed. In a last-minute decision, NASA has decided to extend the…
