Happy-upbeat Environmental News

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…

JAKARTA — Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range,…

DISANGA, Tanzania — Michele Menegon creeps stealthily through short grass before pouncing. Gently, the scientist holds up his prize: an unnamed species of forest agama. He shows the reptile to…

With their bright orange tails and elongated snouts, redtail garras are a popular aquarium fish. Yet while these fish have graced aquariums for decades, information about their biology has been…

If you stress out a rattlesnake, make sure it has a friend around. Much like humans, stressed snakes are calmed by a companion's presence, according to new research. Stress can…

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen significantly since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, as revealed by data released today from Brazil's…

Marisol Villalobos has a routine with her breadfruit trees. Nearly every morning, as the sun is just cresting the horizon, she drives to her groves nestled in the mountains of…

In January 2003, when Wildlife Conservation Society researchers working in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands heard from local hunters that there was a monkey called the kipunji living on the slopes of…

In 2013, scientists found octopuses doing something unusual at Dorado Outcrop, a small seamount off the west coast of Costa Rica. While most octopuses are known to be solitary animals,…

In the arid forests of northern Peru, a rare variety of cacao tree known as blanco de Piura is cultivated by farmers and used to produce "fine-flavor" cacao (the main…

Beatboxing became popular in the 1980s, when Doug E. Fresh performed the style around the New York City hip-hop scene. However, the seeds of this vocal technique, which involves making…

MADURA, Indonesia — For centuries, every architect in Indonesia relied on local materials when constructing homes and public spaces. Today Yu Sing is one of the few holding onto this…

When Mauricio Velasco Castro graduated from culinary school in Bogotá, he didn’t look for a job in one of Colombia’s fine dining restaurants or for an internship abroad. Instead, he…

More carbon is stored in the soil than in all plants, animals and the atmosphere combined, making it among the most critical conservation frontiers as we face the climate crisis.…

Iceland has suspended its planned hunt for fin whales this year, citing animal welfare concerns. On June 20, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, the country’s minister of food, agriculture and fisheries, announced that…

Plants and fungi struck a deal way back when. More than 400 million years ago, plants began trading sugar made from sunlight (a.k.a. carbon) for some of the soil nutrients…

Lions are returning on their own to parks in Mozambique and Chad thanks to the creation of vast landscape mosaics that include core protected areas, corridors and cooperating communities through which the big cats roam.

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…

National science academies from across Europe have become the latest group to announce their support for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a proposed but disputed activity that would extract minerals…

Mayra Parra presses play on her laptop, and the video on the screen comes to life for the Perez family in the town of Abriaquí, Colombia. As a spectacled bear…

With Lula taking office early this year, the fund was resumed and should get new donations from the U.K. and the United States.

A population of endangered elephant shrews has rebounded in a threatened coastal forest reserve in Kenya, suggesting the rabbit-sized mammals with endearingly long snouts could be adapting to both human…

It's easy to miss the mosses, the ubiquitous green, silver and brown carpets that drape across nature's surfaces, from forest to fen. It’s also easy to underestimate just how big…

Bangladesh has recorded the highest number of olive ridley turtle eggs laid on the country’s beaches this nesting season, thanks to extensive conservation actions. A survey by the NGO Nature…

Research has shown that oyster restoration projects in the U.S. have been largely successful, but ecosystem benefits may take decades to fully emerge. In a study published in Conservation Biology,…

On May 9, Ecuador launched a plan that would effectively wipe out the interest on part of its debt in exchange for its protection of the Galápagos Islands, one of…

SHAMSHY, Kyrgyzstan — “I was only 9 when I first saw a snow leopard with my father. He was a ranger bringing injured animals found in the mountains to the…

Fifty years ago, ornithologist Stephen Kress had a bold vision for Eastern Egg Rock, an island off the coast of Maine. He wanted to restore the island’s former colony of…

Algae biofuels were initially hailed as a holy grail to sustainably power the transportation sector. Now after more than a decade of boom and bust, the industry says it’s on the verge of globally scalable, climate-friendly jet, ship and truck fuels.

BAHÍA DE KINO, Mexico — For several years, Cosme Becerra was tasked with sacrificing a sea turtle to be eaten at a festival. In the mid-1990s, the fisherman received a…