Efforts to catalog the fast-declining biodiversity of tropical rainforests just got a $10 million boost via a new competition from XPRIZE, an organization that has more than a dozen competitions…
ROCHESTER, New York and RANOMAFANA NATIONAL PARK, Madagascar — Tom Snyder wants to change the way people see trees. Specifically, he wants to help donors to Seneca Park Zoo in…
The 88.5 meter (290 foot) tree was found by a study team creating a detailed forest biomass map of the Amazon to track carbon emissions caused by land use change.
Giraffes have many problems to deal with. There’s habitat loss and poaching. Then there’s a mysterious skin disease that’s been recorded in 13 giraffe populations in seven African countries. The…
How does fish soup end up on a maize plant? Farmers in Malawi developed the idea to protect their plants from the invasive fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda). They found that…
On October 2nd, the Dutch non-profit The Ocean Cleanup announced that it has successfully developed a device that can capture and collect ocean plastic, moving the organization closer to its…
LAGOS — In early October, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) fitted six elephants in northern Nigeria's Yankari National Park with satellite collars. The collars will help WCS, which works with…
An analysis of 215 companies’ mineral supply chains has found many have fallen short of their obligations under the Conflict Minerals Rule, also known as Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank…
A new app aimed at tracking forest fires in Bolivia could shake up the way authorities and firefighters battle fires, allowing them to pinpoint their locations more accurately and safely.…
The scope of the microplastic pollution problem is astonishing. While nations need to slow the rate of plastics entering Earth's waters, discovering what the density of it is, and where…
In a recently published study, Canadian researchers monitored the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers (Pekania pennanti), a member of the weasel family, across a terrain of over 700 protected areas…
The prospect of monitoring every vessel at sea in real time has moved a step closer to reality as a new generation of surveillance satellites takes to the skies. The…
In September 2014, Nepali zoologist Madhu Chetri asked his professor Morten Odden a strange question during their fieldwork. "Are you tired?" he asked Odden as the duo from the Inland…
High-resolution images from satellite company Planet are revealing glimpses of some of the fires currently devastating the Amazon rainforest. While many of the images currently being shared on social media…
Conservation leaders join successfully with technologists to thwart artisanal gold mining and illegal logging by creating early warning systems and transparency.
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…
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…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government plans to burn waste to fuel power plants in four cities on the island of Java this year as part of efforts to tackle the…
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…
Conservationists are increasingly looking toward technology for aid. We are now better able to monitor forest change as result of deforestation or climate change, survey inaccessible areas for rare species…
Cranes are celebrated for their large size, beauty, unique courtship dancing, and extensive annual migrations. Sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis), for example, migrate north each year from wintering grounds in Mexico…
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…
Until recently, researchers knew of four lakes lying hidden underneath the Greenland ice sheet. Now, scientists say they’ve identified 56 more, bringing the total to 60 known subglacial lakes beneath…
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…
In Whāingaroa/Raglan on New Zealand’s (NZ’s) west coast, trapping for introduced mammals that prey on endangered native birds is something of a competitive sport. Karioi Project, a local conservation NGO…
Globally, the land we use for pasture is contracting, according to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, California. The technical know-how also…
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…
