Our Editorial and News Affiliates
With more than one million unique visitors per month, Mongabay.com is one of the world's most popular environmental science and conservation news sites. The news and rainforests sections of the site are widely cited for information on tropical forests, conservation, and wildlife.
Mongabay.com aims to raise interest in wildlife and wildlands while promoting awareness of environmental issues. Originally the site was based around a text on tropical rainforests written by Rhett A. Butler, but today the site has expanded to other topics (like Madagascar [WildMadagasacar.org]) and is available in versions for kids and in more than two dozen non-English languages. Mongabay.com is also publisher of Tropical Conservation Science, a peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal that seeks to provide opportunities for scientists in developing countries to publish their research in their native languages.
rhett (at) mongabay.com
Saving the Tenkile
June 6, 2013 05:59 AM - Jordanna Dulaney , MONGABAY.COM
The tenkile, or the Scott's tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus scottae) could be a cross between a koala bear and a puppy. With it's fuzzy dark fur, long tail and snout, and tiny ears, it's difficult to imagine a more adorable animal. It's also difficult to imagine that the tenkile is one of the most endangered species on Earth: only an estimated 300 remain. According to the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA), the tenkile's trouble stems from a sharp increase of human settlements in the Torricelli mountain range. Once relatively isolated, the tenkile now struggles to avoid hunters and towns while still having sufficient range to live in.
Difference within Common Species May Predict the Presence of Rare Animals
June 5, 2013 10:31 AM - Jenny R. Isaacs, MONGABAY.COM
When deciding whether or not to clear a patch of rainforest land for development, scientists are often called in to quantify how many different species exist there. But determining the number of rare and threatened species living in a section of jungle isn't easy. If they are very rare, the individual members of the species will be hard to find; if the area being surveyed is along a steep slope it may be difficult to access the area; if there are lots of species to identify, you might need to hire a dream team of biologists—each specialized within a different area of biodiversity—and that can get expensive. However a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal by an international group of scientists suggests a more cost-effective and efficient way to rapidly assess local biodiversity: instead of spending time and money looking at everything—searching for rare and threatened individuals in a forest patch or on a hillside—focus instead on the biological difference which can easily be determined within a few, easy-to-find, common species.
Data from NASA's Landsat 8 now available in almost real time
June 3, 2013 06:19 AM - Editor, MONGABAY.COM
Data from NAA's Landsat 8 is now freely available, enabling researchers and the general public to access images captured by the satellite within twelve hours of reception. The data is available to download at no charge from GloVis, EarthExplorer, or via the LandsatLook Viewer. Landsat 8 launched this February and has been capturing images since April. The satellite orbits Earth every 99 minutes and captures images of every point on the planet every 16 days, beaming 400 high resolution images to ground stations every 24 hours. Landsat features nine spectral bands, which include three visible light bands, two near-infrared bands, and two shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands, among others, as well as two thermal sensors, which are used for a wide range of applications, including monitoring environmental change, detecting fires, and watching crops. Google is one of the biggest commercial users of Landsat images, which feed into Google Earth, but other users include scientists and conservationists involved in tracking deforestation and forest degradation.
Rainforests will survive extreme global warming, argues study
June 2, 2013 09:52 PM - Editor, MONGABAY.COM
Rainforests in South America have survived three previous extreme global warming events in the past, suggesting that they will survive a projected 2-6 degree rise in temperatures over the coming century, reports a study published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. The research, published by Carlos Jaramillo and Andrés Cárdenas of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, reviewed some 3,800 published estimates of temperature over the past 120 million years and compared them to the existence of tropical plants in the fossil record.
New Study Predicts Significant Global Warming
May 30, 2013 02:57 PM - Jeremy Hance, MONGABAY.COM
A new study by Australian scientists projects that the world will likely warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels by 2100. The study published in Nature Climate Change finds that exceeding the 2-degree threshold is very likely under business-as-usual emissions scenarios even as scientists have long warned that passing the 2-degree mark would lead to catastrophic climate change. "This study ultimately shows why waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy," lead author Roger Bodman from Victoria University said. "Some uncertainty will always remain, meaning that we need to manage the risks of warming with the knowledge we have."
Scientists Discover High Mercury Levels in Amazon Residents, Gold-Mining to Blame
May 29, 2013 01:35 PM - Lacey Avery, MONGABAY.COM
The Madre de Dios region in Peru is recognized for its lush Amazon rainforests, meandering rivers and rich wildlife. But the region is also known for its artisanal gold mining, which employs the use of a harmful neurotoxin. Mercury is burned to extract the pure gold from metal and ore producing dangerous air-borne vapors that ultimately settle in nearby rivers.
Plants re-grow after five centuries under the ice
May 28, 2013 08:42 AM - Tanya Dimitrova, MONGABAY.COM
While monitoring the retreat of the Teardrop Glacier in the Canadian Arctic, scientists have found that recently unfrozen plants, some of which had been under ice since the reign of Henry VIII, were capable of new growth. While in the field, the researchers from the University of Alberta discovered that the receding ice--which has doubled from 2 meters per year in the 1990s to 4.1 meters per year in 2009--had uncovered lots of mosses and other non-vascular plants, including more than 60 plant species. Upon careful examination, the scientists were impressed by how well preserved the delicate bodies were; the stems and leaf structures were perfectly intact, although some of them were only one-cell layer think.
India's hornbill conservator is awarded the "Green Oscar"
May 23, 2013 08:54 AM - Akhila Vijayaraghavan, MONGABAY.COM
The Whitley Awards is a prestigious international prize awarded annually to individuals working in nature conservation at a grassroots level. They were first awarded in 1994 and over the past two decades, the Whitley fund for nature has given almost £10 million ($15 million USD) to conservation and recognized 160 conservation leaders in more than 70 countries. These awards are known as the 'Green Oscars' and are often awarded to conservationists working in conflict-torn and developing countries. This year, the prestigious prize was awarded to Aparajita Datta's project, "threatened hornbills as icons for the conservation of the Himalayan forests of Arunachal Pradesh, India".
Researchers Develop Highest-resolution Global Forest Cover Dataset to Date
May 17, 2013 01:38 PM - Rhett Butler, MONGABAY.COM
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a 30-meter resolution forest cover data set that could boost efforts to track deforestation and forest degradation.
Industrialized fishing has forced seabirds to change what they eat
May 15, 2013 08:47 AM - Jeremy Hance, MONGABAY.COM
The bleached bones of seabirds are telling us a new story about the far-reaching impacts of industrial fisheries on today's oceans. Looking at the isotopes of 250 bones from Hawaiian petrels (Pterodroma sandwichensis), scientists have been able to reconstruct the birds' diets over the last 3,000 years. They found an unmistakable shift from big prey to small prey around 100 years ago, just when large, modern fisheries started scooping up fish at never before seen rates. The dietary shift shows that modern fisheries upended predator and prey relationships even in the ocean ocean and have possibly played a role in the decline of some seabirds.