2019: The year rainforests burned
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Rhett A. Butler 27 December 20192019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…
Conservation biologist and wildtech journalist Sue Palminteri, 1965-2019
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Rhett A. Butler 11 December 2019Whether it was radio-collaring elephants across the savannas of South Africa, competing internationally alongside the Israeli national team in tennis, tracking saki monkeys through the rainforest in the sweltering mid-day…
Camera traps yield surprises in West Africa’s largest protected area
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Jerimiah Oetting 2 December 2019Protected lands in the tropics are often managed to curtail poaching, creating a refuge for vulnerable wildlife that face risks of extinction.? However, a new study in West Africa’s largest…
$10M in prize money for mapping rainforest biodiversity
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Rhett A. Butler 27 November 2019Efforts 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…
Tree-planting programs turn to tech solutions to track effectiveness
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Malavika Vyawahare 22 November 2019ROCHESTER, 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…
LIDAR technology leads Brazilian team to 30 story tall Amazon tree
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Jenny Gonzales 11 November 2019The 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.
Can camera traps diagnose the severity of a mystery giraffe skin disease?
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Shreya Dasgupta 30 October 2019Giraffes 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…
Fighting Africa’s fall armyworm invasion with radio shows and phone apps
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Stephanie Parker 28 October 2019How 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…
The Ocean Cleanup successfully collects ocean plastic, aims to scale design
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Rachael Meyer 28 October 2019On 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…
Satellite collars to help boost protection for Nigeria’s largest remaining elephant herd
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Linus Unah 25 October 2019LAGOS — 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…
Companies ‘disregard responsibility’ over conflict minerals: Report
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Mongabay.com 23 October 2019An 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…
New app tracks down forest fires in Bolivia
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John C. Cannon 30 September 2019A 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.…
New detection devices could record microplastic pollution levels in real time
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Erik Hoffner 11 September 2019The 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…
Protected areas best conserve mammalian diversity when connected with corridors, biologged weasels show
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Emi Kusayanagi 4 September 2019In 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…
‘No place to hide’ for illegal fishing fleets as surveillance satellites prepare for lift-off
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Gavin Haines 30 August 2019The 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…
Snow leopard population overestimated in Nepal? DNA study suggests it may be
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Abhaya Raj Joshi 23 August 2019In 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…
Satellite images from Planet reveal devastating Amazon fires in near real-time
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Rhett A. Butler 22 August 2019High-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…
Precision conservation: High tech to the rescue in the Peruvian Amazon
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Lisa Palmer 15 August 2019Conservation leaders join successfully with technologists to thwart artisanal gold mining and illegal logging by creating early warning systems and transparency.
Tests show multi-rotor UAVs can improve cetacean behavioral studies
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Sue Palminteri (1965-2019) 9 August 2019A 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…
New toolkit identifies multiple species from environmental DNA
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Sue Palminteri (1965-2019) 3 August 2019Researchers 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…