It’s as if a professional cleaner has been let loose in the rainforest. The whistles of birds and croaks of frogs have been vacuumed up, the messy understory cleared away. Where once chaotic tangles of vines and saplings wrestled over flecks of sunlight beneath a shady canopy, now trees of the same height stand tidy and organized in neatly spaced rows beneath the scorching sun.
forestation project. But something has gone very wrong.
Woodlark Island lies off the coast of Papua New Guinea and is home to dozens of unique species and a more than 2,000-year-old human culture.
What will future generations nickname this tumultuous period in Earth history?
This post was originally published on Mongabay.com Dung beetles have emerged as one of the most intensively studied animal groups in tropical rainforests. They are very easy and cheap to survey and are strong indicators of the health of rainforests and the presence of diverse mammal communities. Dung beetles also […]
Protected areas are the cornerstone of the conservation movement, and, for the most part, they work quite well. They do have some hefty pitfalls though. One of these is that the comings and goings of many globetrotting or wide roaming species pay little heed to whether an area has been […]
It’s 1998, and as Borneo’s rainforests are being ravaged by some of the most unsustainable logging the world has ever known, one timber company is bucking the trend and investing in its future. Twenty years later, the results of Sari Bumi Kasuma’s (SBK) foresight are clear to see. Elsewhere across […]
It’s July 1996 and Dr. Martin Walsh has just arrived on Unguja, a small island nestled within an archipelago thirty-seven kilometres off the coast of Tanzania. He’s been tasked with finding an elusive predator many conservationists fear already to be extinct. Known locally as “King”, it’s not officially been sighted […]
In an ideal world we would protect the whole alphabet of animals, from aardvarks through to zebra sharks. But conservation doesn’t happen in an ideal world—it happens on a shoestring budget. Future extinction rates could get as high as three species disappearing per hour, which leaves conservationists with some very […]
In Indonesia and Malaysia, hungrily expanding oil-palm plantations are swallowing pristine jungles. In the Brazilian Amazon, cattle-ranching has chewed up an area of forest the size of Italy in just 22 years. In Madagascar, an explosion in sapphire mining is nibbling away at natural treasures. Now, we can pinpoint with increasing certainty a […]