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This is the second article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” Read Part One here. No one knows when humans first encountered the Sumatran rhinoceros, the smallest, hairiest, most loquacious and arguably strangest of all living rhinos. But that…

Around 18 kilometers southeast of Tibet’s Lake Mansarovar, a sacred lake for both Hindus and Buddhists, there lies yet another pilgrimage site, albeit of a different nature: The Limi Valley, on the other side of the border with Nepal, is considered sacred…

Illegal mining is destroying the Amazon. Most people know this, but it is chilling to see the destruction in aerial images that show details of the mining camps, trucks and backhoes operating 24 hours a day. The images also show dredges extracting material…

Caura National Park is under pressure from gold miners, but Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous groups have teamed with NGOs and companies to do sustainable agroforestry and safeguard forests.

EMBOBUT FOREST, Kenya — One morning in May, David Kisang, 50, sat outside his tiny dome-shaped hut, with its walls made of sticks and black polythene for a roof, sipping tea. His two red calves grazed behind the hut while his cattle and merino sheep grazed…

September 24 marks World Gorilla Day, when humanity celebrates one of its closest relatives, sharing 98 percent of our DNA as we do, plus we also have a common ancestor that lived not too long ago in evolutionary terms, around 10 million years ago. All species…

The most popular stories from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, followed trafficking of jaguar parts in Peru and Bolivia, a strategy to limit cattle ranches in Colombia, and liberated macaws in Ecuador. High demand for jaguar parts in Peru In a…

MEDELLIN, Colombia — Keeping an eye on what is going on out in the vast countryside of Colombia’s palm oil plantations is a challenge. But that may be about to change. Thanks to a combination of satellites, drones and the Internet of Things (IOT), farmers…

Every year, millions of baby birds leave the security of their nests, flying off into the uncertainty of the outside world. A single chick’s fledging takes just a moment, and all chicks in a nest typically fly off within an hour or two, so people, even…

The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is sounding the alarm over what it calls a “shadowy agreement” made by the Myanmar government to allow the logging and export of 5,000 tons of hardwood timber, including 3,000 tons of highly prized…

Tropical forests People settled Madagascar thousands of years before previously thought, meaning the island’s first human inhabitants didn’t cause the extinction of the elephant bird (Science Magazine). Nestlé, one of the world’s largest corporations,…

Marine ecologists have described a bright-red species of coral from Panama that’s new to science. The researchers found the coral growing at a depth of 45 to 50 meters (148 to 164 feet) in Hannibal Bank, a coastal seamount 60 kilometers (37 miles) off…

Researchers say they have discovered the conditions that determine whether deep soil acts as a source of carbon emissions, releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or as a sink, sequestering the carbon and keeping it from contributing to…

JAKARTA — Indigenous rights activists in Indonesia have expressed concern that the government is stalling the passage of a long-awaited bill on indigenous rights by tangling the legislative process in red tape. The government said in July that it had agreed…

When it comes to the multi-billion dollar global illegal wildlife trafficking market, security experts note a “threat convergence” where trafficking and organized crime meet. Because of that convergence, trafficking in illegal natural resources is a major…

This is the first article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle.” It’s hardly the most likely place to meet a Sumatran rhino. But as you enter Zimmer Hall at the University of Cincinnati , deep in the heart of the Midwestern United States, there…

Around 40,000 African elephants are illegally killed for their tusks every year. But catching ivory poachers, and successfully convicting them, has remained incredibly hard. In 2016, for instance, Kenyan businessman Feisal Mohamed Ali was found guilty of…

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has signed a moratorium on new licenses for oil palm plantations. The presidential instruction, signed on Sept. 19, will remain in place for no more than three years, according to the policy document, seen by Mongabay.…

PALEMBANG, Indonesia — For those worried about the plight of the Sumatran tiger, of which only a few hundred remain, concern typically flows from a sense that all life is worth saving. For Teater Potlot, a theater group based in South Sumatra, Indonesia, the…

New research finds that the mass bleaching event that led to the death of 30 percent of shallow-water corals on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 also had a substantial impact on deep reefs. Occurring at depths lower than 30 to 40 meters below the surface of the…