Mongabay

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we speak with Laurel Symes, a biologist who is using bioacoustics to study tropical katydids in Central America. Listen here:   Laurel Symes is assistant director of the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the…

In eastern Liberia, efforts are underway to formally demarcate the boundaries of Sapo National Park, the largest tract of protected rainforest in the country and one of the most important in West Africa. Sapo is home to one of the most diverse ecosystems of…

Laura Jiménez, Manuel Herrera and Elías Santiago grew up in a land where elders proudly related how they managed to recover their forests, hearing them recount how the Mexican government had allowed private companies to take advantage of the wood from trees…

The Isha Foundation, a spiritual organization headquartered in south India, is taking on the cause of revitalizing India’s imperiled rivers. With government and public support, it says it has successfully raised enough money to plant more than 46 million…

Philip Jacobson, an award-winning editor for the environmental science news outlet Mongabay, has been arrested for an alleged visa violation in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, on Tuesday after being put under city arrest for a month. Jacobson, 30, was first…

Peru is the world’s leading producer of fish meal, but it’s unclear precisely how much of the substance it makes, given that a sizeable portion appears to be off the books. The industry is based on the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), a silvery little member…

Madagascar has embarked on its most ambitious tree-planting drive yet, aiming to plant 60 million trees in the coming months. The island nation celebrates 60 years of independence this year, and the start of the planting campaign on Jan. 19 marked one year…

Indigenous group entered Brazilian museum and retrieved sacred funeral urns that courts said were rightly theirs, but which dam construction firm and authorities kept from them.

Howler monkeys change their calls when they’re close to deforested areas, a new study has found. A team of researchers, led by anthropologist Laura Bolt of the University of Waterloo in Canada, looked at the frequency and intensity of mantled howler monkey…

Two Darwin’s rheas (Rhea pennata) run at full speed between the thorny bushes and tall grasslands that cover the paleobasin – an ancient river basin and floodplain near the Bermejo River in Argentina. The rheas stop in unison for a few seconds, as if…

One of just four North Atlantic right whale calves spotted off the southeast coast of the United States so far this winter was discovered last week to have suffered deep propeller wounds to both sides of its head. Barb Zoodsma of the National Marine Fisheries…

Tropical forests Farmers in Haiti have been paid after nearly a decade for the land they lost following the 2010 earthquake (The Christian Science Monitor). The CO2 emissions from volcanoes are helping scientists study tropical forests (Eos). A toddler…

Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.

For many Himalayan pastoral societies, yaks are a cornerstone of their livelihoods as much as of their social and religious traditions. Climate scientists consider this cold-adapted creature a barometer of climate change, looking at how it struggles to survive…

On Dec. 31, a fully grown male Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) was found shot and killed at the famed Uda Walawe National Park. It was also reported that the forelegs of the majestic beast had been severed and its teeth pulled out, giving rise to a…

Farmers and irregular occupants in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in Acre are enjoying newfound political power and pressuring for the reduction of the first protected area of its kind in Brazil as it approaches its 30th anniversary in March.

This was meant to be a moment of triumph in the long battle to save the world’s forests. The year when the bold commitment hundreds of companies made to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains by 2020 was met, when the relentless destruction of…

JAKARTA — Forest rangers in Indonesia’s Aceh province will this year be allowed to carry firearms for the first time in decades, in the latest move by local authorities toward harsher law enforcement against environmental violators. The Aceh government has…

More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found. The study, published Jan. 6 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology…

Jaime Luis Arias grew up on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. An isolated coastal pyramid-shaped massif in northern Colombia, the Sierra Nevada is one of the highest coastal mountains on the planet, with the snow-capped peaks rising from…