Mongabay series: Conservation Effectiveness

People have been planting trees to restock forests for a very long time. In the 16th century, for instance, wealthy landowners in Britain and Europe established tree plantations to supply…

There’s a tree-planting frenzy everywhere you look. In August 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India announced that more than a million Indians had planted 220 million trees…

For centuries, Lake Andranobe in Madagascar's central highlands has nourished the surrounding communities. Over the past 16 years, its dependents have come together to restore the ailing lake. Now, that…

Like a mermaid on an underwater picnic, she floats gently in the current as slivers of sunlight reveal a garden of corals in the Golfo Dulce, in southern Costa Rica.…

As Colombia searches for a way forward after a half-century of war, the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) could have a significant role to play. Called the food of the gods,…

The vast tangled mangrove forests that sweep along so many tropical coasts are one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. They also play crucial roles in protecting coastlines from erosion…

The world’s protected areas are largely a jumble of disjointed refuges, separated from each other by the encroachment of human impacts, a recent study has found. Fewer than 10% of…

We’ve all had duds. We’ve worked on projects far longer than we would have liked to and failed. We’ve agonized over missteps. We’ve learned from roadblocks — sometimes we’ve not.…

Bats are a weird and wonderful branch of the tree of life. The only mammals that can truly fly, and the group that has developed echolocation or "seeing with sound"…

On today’s episode, we speak with Oliver Metcalf, lead author of a recent study that used bioacoustic recordings and machine learning to track birds in New Zealand after they’d been…

There’s a lot to listen for in a tropical forest. There’s the sound of life: the howls, the hoots, the croaks. There’s the sound of loss: the buzz of chainsaws,…

The best fictional detectives — Holmes, Tennison, Mars, Warshawski, Wallander — all employ their almost miraculous skills of observation and deduction to solve a whodunit. They rely on instinct, yes,…

OK, Google: Has the general public lost interest in biodiversity conservation? Has people’s interest in environmental issues been overshadowed by climate change alone? The answer to both questions, according to…

Local and indigenous communities seem to hold the key to protecting both forests and the massive amounts of carbon that they contain — and on which we all depend. But…

Some strategies for protecting forests and wildlife, such as protected areas and community forestry, have become immensely popular around the world. But do these conservation strategies truly achieve the objectives…

The other members of the team behind Mongabay's Conservation Effectiveness series and I appreciate the feedback on our series offered by Madeleine McKinnon and her colleagues. We believe that we…

This commentary is in response to Mongabay's Conservation Effectiveness series. You can read Mongabay's response here. Scientists are keen to get better data and evidence into the hands of decision-makers…

The international arm of Greenpeace has ended its membership with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a certification organization that aims to ensure responsibly managed forests. "We believe robust timber certification…

When a final agreement to protect the Great Bear Rainforest was announced in February 2016, it was hailed as a major victory for First Nations and environmental activists. More than…

A British government office has prosecuted a wood importer certified by the Forest Stewardship Council after it was found to have failed to ensure the legality of a shipment of…

Making ecotourism pay for local communities while also protecting wildlife has proven a challenge in many parts of the world. Often, the boost in a local economy doesn’t always convince…

I sit huddled in the hide, the sharp winter air stinging my cheeks and making my eyes tear up. Blinking, I catch sight of movement in the reeds. Out steps…

In 1962, at the First World Conference of National Parks in Seattle, U.S., Carleton Ray, a marine biologist at the University of Virginia, pleaded the cause of setting aside “unmolested”…

In 1986, Patricia Wright, then a budding primatologist, spent weeks combing the rainforests of eastern Madagascar in search of the greater bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus), a five-pound bamboo-eating primate that…

When a female Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), and then her daughter, died in India’s Burachapori Wildlife Sanctuary last year, conservationists were worried. The rhinos’ horns were intact, so they had…

Piles of wood lie in an open area behind the main office of the Arabari Reserve Forest in West Bengal, India. Long logs and cut planks of sal trees (Shorea…

As far as conservation strategies go, payments for ecosystem services (PES) are based on a relatively simple concept — perhaps deceptively simple. The idea behind PES is, essentially, to pay…

Tropical timber has earned a bad reputation. When we think of timber from lush, tropical forests, it conjures up images of valuable old-growth trees pillaged by logging companies and illegal…

How do you solve a conservation problem? Do you protect a wild leopard that has entered a village by removing it and releasing it into a forest far, far away?…

How do you save a species or protect a habitat? For the past few decades, scientists have been calling for an increased use of scientific evidence -- carefully controlled, peer-reviewed…