topic: Videos

topic: Videos

Social media activity version | Lean version

VIDEO: Can bioplastics help shape a more sustainable future? | Problem Solved
- Humanity produces roughly 400 million metric tons of plastic each year, yet only recycles or reuses 9%, at most, of all the plastic collected.
- The global waste crisis is evident in the immense amount of plastic trash that ends up polluting the land, water, atmosphere, wildlife, and even our bodies.
- While nations are currently locked in negotiations to design a global treaty meant to rein in plastic production and address plastic pollution, researchers are working to develop fully biodegradable and naturally occurring plastic polymers known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs).
- In this episode of Mongabay’s “Problem Solved” video series, we take a look at how PHAs are made, and what else experts say needs to be done to combat the global plastic pollution crisis.

VIDEO: Unmasking the environmental impact of tires | Consumed
- Ever since they were invented, tires have changed the way we live; today, we produce almost 2.5 billion tires annually.
- However, the way we make, use and discard tires has left a trail of destruction that has polluted our water, land and air.
- Consumed is a video series by Mongabay that explores the environmental impacts of products we use in our daily lives.
- In the latest episode of the series, we take a look at how tires impact our planet

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for October 2023
- In September, Mongabay released videos about the Dutch dairy farmers’ protests and related politics, typhoon-battered villages in the Philippines, and farmers growing rice for wild elephants in India.
- Watch why an Indigenous community in Brazil is pushing ahead with sustainable solutions despite resistance and threat, how bats roosting in south India’s temples are in trouble, and what an Indigenous kingdom in Panama is doing to secure its right to the forest.
- In India, pharmaceutical drugs are adding to water pollution even as a village waits decades for its clean source of water polluted by big industries.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Video: Rice as a peace offering in India’s human-elephant conflict capital
- Assam state in northeastern India, where farmers and elephants jostle for space and food, has one of the highest incidences of human-elephant conflict in the country.
- Conservationists from Hati Bondhu, a nonprofit organization, are working with farmers in Assam’s Golaghat district to pursue a more peaceful human-elephant coexistence.
- Their first experimental project, which was to grow rice in some fields dedicated to elephants so farmers could harvest separately elsewhere, was a success.
- They’re now planning solutions to overcome the limitations of this short-term project, involving more villages and planting more species outside of farmlands in large-scale projects.

Mongabay Explains: How high-tech tools are used for successful reforestation
- This Mongabay Explains’ episode is part of a four-part Mongabay mini-series that examines the latest technological solutions to help tree-planting projects achieve scale and long-term efficiency.
- Using these innovative approaches could be vital for meeting international targets to repair degraded ecosystems, sequester carbon, and restore biodiversity.
- Advanced computer modeling, machine learning, drones, niche models using data, robotics and other technologies are helping to restore hundreds of millions of hectares of lost and degraded forest worldwide.

Video: Rio de Janeiro’s defender of mangroves
- Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro has suffered for decades from inefficient sewage treatment, oil spills and mangrove deforestation.
- For more than 30 years, biologist Mario Moscatelli has been fighting to reverse this process and revitalize the landscape.
- For denouncing corruption, environmental crimes and government inaction, he faced intimidation and even death threats.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for August 2023
- Mongabay’s videos in July covered stories about local foods known to local communities are becoming more popular across their countries, how farmers are using apps and technologies to cope with climate change, and how scientists are trying restoration projects on rivers and wetlands.
- In Bosnia, scientists are using rapid biological surveys to protect rivers from dams. In India, Delhi has seen the worst floods in four decades due to neglect.
- Watch how a luxury project threatens the Atlantic Forest and traditional communities in Brazil, and the latest in solar power developments in India.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for July 2023
- In June, Mongabay released videos showing the rodeo culture that’s developed in the Amazon, how wild jungle cat in India has adapted to an agricultural landscape, and why researchers are fitting the Amazon dolphins with radio transmitters.
- A video documentation from Madagascar shows how NGOs and communities are trying to restore a reforestation effort that was destroyed by wildfires. From India, watch how renewable energy projects are rising in a district once famous for illegal mining.
- Watch a video interview of a Munduruku Indigenous leader in Brazil at the “Free Land Camp” event, documented by a collective of young Munduruku people.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for June 2023
- Mongabay’s May videos show new discoveries of hydrothermal vents from deep in the oceans and blind fish from shallow aquifers, success and failure narratives in waste management in India, and stories of small-scale farmers in the Philippines and Cambodia.
- Watch how herders from Senegal are fighting for their land and the country’s drinking water against a U.S. agricultural company, why the Indigenous and local community in Colombia is divided over a Canadian mining company, and what the construction of a Chinese-funded dam means to a Philippine Indigenous community.
- In India, city-dwellers have taken to urban and peri-urban agriculture to encourage sustainability, and Indigenous women are gaining financial independence through traditional jewelry that uses natural materials
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for May 2023
- Mongabay’s April videos covered stories about pollution affecting food sources in India, the relationship between gold and Indigenous communities in Brazil, farmers’ plight in Cambodia, sustainable civet coffee in the Philippines, and more.
- In Japan, a reforestation method practiced by the fishing community for decades has just been proved to work by the scientific community. More farmers in India are opting natural farming and agroforestry methods to adapt to climate change.
- Among the wildlife videos, watch how the most endangered ape in the world, the Tapanuli orangutan, is losing habitat to a development project in Indonesia. Technology in wildlife is helping us understand shark pregnancies and katydid mating practices better.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for April 2023
- In March, Mongabay released videos showing how mining in different countries is devestating both ecosystems and local communities for a long time, and how the communities are fighting back.
- Watch how changing climates, growing populations and burgeoning industrialization are the reasons for the food crisis becoming an increasingly serious concern in Kenya, and how development projects in Southeast Asia are threatening the critical environmental areas.
- Watch interviews with conservation players from India — documentary director Kartiki Gonsalves, author and authority on wildlife M.K. Ranjitsinh Jhala, and energy expert Purnima Jalihal.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

China-funded bridge threatens Paradise Reef in southern Philippines
- Samal Island, a popular tourist destination near Davao City in the southern Philippines, is fringed by a 300-meter (980-foot) coral system known as Paradise Reef, which hosts more than 100 coral species.
- A plan to build a bridge linking Davao to Samal threatens to destroy the reef, scientists and conservationists warn.
- Campaigners in the area are calling on the Philippine government to reroute the bridge to minimize damage to the ecosystem.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for March 2023
- In February, Mongabay covered how conservationists in Ukraine are working through the war, how remote communities in the Amazon are using solar energy, and the benefits of introducing agroecology in India’s coconut plantations.
- Indigenous political representatives and lawmakers in Brazil discussed with Mongabay the issues they are about to start tackling now that the government and political intentions have changed.
- In Mongabay’s latest episodes of Mongabay Sessions, host Romi Castagnino spoke with the ‘Wildcat’ documentary team about rescuing a baby ocelot from the black market and releasing it in the wild.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

‘If Brazil starts with us, why did we arrive last?’: Q&A with Indigenous lawmaker Célia Xakriabá
- Indigenous lawmaker Célia Xakriabá says the fight for the climate emergency was key to her election to Brazil’s Congress last year, which drew votes from people with a completely different political party alignment.
- “We were not only elected by progressive people [voting]. It is the environmental issue, the issue for life, the issue of the right to water, the issue of the right to food without poison [pesticides]” — issues that she tells Mongabay must go beyond the progressive parties.
- In this video interview, Célia Xakriabá says one of her priorities in Congress is to create a secretariat for Indigenous education within the Ministry of Education, and establish quotas for Indigenous people at several levels, including Indigenous professors in universities and job posts in embassies.
- Another priority is an update to the statute on Indigenous peoples, which she says is still written “in a racist way and in a retrograde way.” Change is already coming on this front: on its first day in office, the new government changed the name of the federal Indigenous affairs agency from the National Indian Foundation to the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for February 2023
- Mongabay’s videos from January show the effects agriculture and food farms have on local populations in Liberia, India and Chile alike. Watch also how climate change is impacting the food systems, and thus farmers and the Indigenous, in India and Brazilian Amazon.
- Mongabay spoke with the newly elected Indigenous representatives in Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government about how the new developments mark a “new era” for Indigenous populations and the environment.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Joenia Wapichana: ‘I want to see the Yanomami and Raposa Serra do Sol territories free of invasions’
- In this video interview two weeks before the health disaster outbreak in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, Joenia Wapichana, the first Indigenous woman named president of Brazil’s national Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, says one of her priorities at the institution is the expulsion of 20,000 illegal gold miners from the area.
- “Indigenous health is a chaos there. Children are dying of malaria and malnutrition. So, it is not simply a matter of removing the miners, but you have to take immediate action to ensure security there,” she tells Mongabay at Funai’s headquarters in Brasília.
- Joenia Wapichana says coordinated actions are required among several governmental entities with “permanent oversight” to put an end to this crisis: “It’s not simply remove [the wildcat miners] and leave no one there to protect.”
- Given Funai’s precarious budget of 600 million reais ($118 million) per year, she says cooperation agreements with other countries, a successful strategy in the past, will be key to carrying out the demarcation of Indigenous lands in the Amazon that were stalled under the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Mongabay’s What-to-Watch list for January 2023
- Mongabay’s December videos covered an investigation of land grabbing in Brazil, a biomass producer outed by a whistleblower in the U.S., farmers facing drought in India, rising seas in Sierra Leone, and more.
- While the Chasing Deforestation episode shows us how a religious group is clearing the Amazon in Peru, the latest Mongabay Explains episode throws light on why bottom trawling is so controversial.
- Watch how monoculture has degraded the soil in Brazil, how the government means to secure fast-eroding islands in India, how cocoa plantations in Brazil helped recover degraded land, and India’s experiments with cage-based aquaculture.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s 10 most popular videos of 2022
- Here we rewatch the top 10 favorite videos of 2022 on Mongabay’s YouTube channel.
- Indigenous communities and wildlife are among the main characters of the most-watched videos of the past year.
- Mongabay launched two new video series called “Chasing Deforestation” and “Consumed.”

Major Brazil palm oil exporter accused of fraud, land-grabbing over Quilombola cemeteries
- Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with the sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is accused of a wide range of land-grabbing allegations in Pará state.
- The claims allege that more than half of the 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres) registered by Agropalma was derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau, which is at the center of a legal battle led by state prosecutors and public defenders.
- Quilombola communities say that part of the area occupied by Agropalma overlaps with their ancestral land, including two cemeteries visited by Mongabay. In one of them, residents claim that just one-quarter of the cemetery remains and that the company planted palm trees on top of the graves, which the company denies.
- There are also other financial interests in the land at stake, researchers say, pointing to the company’s moves into bauxite mining and the sale of carbon credits in the areas subject to litigation, further intensifying the disputes.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for December 2022
- Mongabay’s videos from November covered how land grabbing and pollution alike are affecting Indigenous and local communities in Brazil, India, Nigeria and the Amazon.
- Watch how wildlife in India’s Kashmir, America’s Montana, and a park in Brazil are influenced by human action, both positively and negatively.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Video: Wildlife crossings built with tribal knowledge drastically reduce collisions
- The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes collaborated with the Montana Department of Transportation to design and build one of the largest networks of wildlife highway crossings in the U.S.
- Previously known as one of Montana’s most dangerous roads, Highway 93 was upgraded to include 42 wildlife crossings that were built based on Indigenous traditional knowledge and values.
- According to a 2015 study, animal collisions declined by 71%.
- Today, more than 22,000 animals use these wildlife crossings annually, camera traps show.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for November 2022
- Mongabay’s October videos show how the world’s consumption of products have multiple effects on the environment in various regions and on ecosystems, and what consequences road and railway projects have on forests and communities in Brazil and Mexico.
- Watch Afro-Brazilian communities practising their traditional agriculture that bring together production and conservation around Brazil’s Atlantic forests, and how authorities and communities are dealing with human-wildlife conflicts in India and Indonesia in their own ways.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for October 2022
- Mongabay dove into research and talked with experts to answer a question more and more people are asking now: should we have kids? The latest episodes of Mongabay’s Problem Solved explains how having, or not having, more children affects the environment and climate change.
- Another Mongabay series Candid Animal Cam takes a peek into the lives of the migrating bearded pigs of Southeast Asia, while Mongabay Explains shows us why the Earth’s water cycle is nearing breaking-point.
- In Brazil, a record number of Indigenous candidates are running in the general elections this month and farmers have turned into firefighters. In Mexico, Indigenous communities are fighting drought with water wells.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for September 2022
- In August, Mongabay covered a mangrove restoration project in the Philippines and an Indigenous community’s effort to domesticate a rare flower. We also released videos showing the connection between climate change and extinction, and climate change and clean energy.
- Watch how the cocaine industry is impacting the environment, how the Mediterranian countries are dealing with invasive crabs, and why avocado farms aren’t all that palatable in Mexico’s agricultural sector.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Video: Biodiversity underpins all, as California is finding out the hard way
- A new episode of “Mongabay Explains” delves into the biodiversity crisis in California, which is known to be one of the most biodiverse states in the U.S., hosting about 6,500 animal species, subspecies and plants.
- California has been bearing the brunt of climate change in recent years as wildfires and drought transform the land.
- The film focuses on three species that are being negatively affected by the climate crisis: California tiger salamanders, acorn woodpeckers, and monarch butterflies.
- The filmmaker says California is the “poster child of what’s happening to our ecosystems around the world.”

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for August 2022
- Mongabay’s July videos show how Indigenous communities in Brazil are recovering native crops, why a coastal developmental project in India is facing protests, how the weather can be used to control forest fires in the Amazon, and other issues globally.
- Two Mongabay YouTube series — Chasing Deforestation and Mongabay Webinars — released new episodes, about Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem and about how to cover oceans and fisheries, respectively.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for July 2022
- Mongabay’s videos from June show communities in Mexico and Jordan taking up landscape restoration and reforestation projects to protect native ecosystems, and how a group of Indigenous women in the U.S. have started farming sugar kelp to fix nitrogen pollution.
- Mongabay series Problem Solved explored technology in conservation to protect endangered species from extinction. Another Mongabay series Candid Animal Cam gives us a glimpse into the lives and habits of the black bears in North America.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Can conservation technology help save our rapidly disappearing species? | Problem Solved
- Humanity knows, in a best-case scenario, only 20% of the total species on Earth.
- Yet humans have, at a minimum, increased species extinction 1,000 times above the natural extinction rate, raising concerns among field monitoring experts who worry they may be “writing the obituary of a dying planet.”
- The establishment of protected areas often depends on the ability of conservationists to effectively monitor and track land-based species — but is this happening fast enough?
- For this episode of “Problem Solved,” Mongabay breaks down three of the most innovative pieces of conservation technology and how they can advance the field of species monitoring, and ultimately, conservation.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for June 2022
- Mongabay’s May videos show how communities in the Philippines and Jordan are restoring landscapes to fight climate change, and how India’s landscapes are changing and affecting communities around rivers and coasts.
- Watch the sloths in Costa Rica using bridges, humans fighting for bees’ rights, and how renewable energy is helping with women empowerment in India.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for May 2022
- Mongabay’s April videos show why Indigenous communities in Brazil turned to videography and graffiti to raise awareness, how wind farms in India have their downsides, and what journalists can do to cover reforestation better.
- Watch camera trap footage of Côte d’Ivoire’s chimpanzees’ unique way of drinking water using sticks during the dry season, and videos of the elusive caracal that are not so elusive anymore in South Africa.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for April 2022
- In March, Mongabay covered landscape restoration projects in different countries, injustice to Brazil’s Indigenous communities regarding land rights, human-elephant conflict in India due to oil palm plantations, and other issues worldwide.
- Three YouTube series — Mongabay Explains, Problem Solved, and Candid Animal Cam — released new episodes featuring coral reefs, aerosol issues, technology-critical elements, and the gray brocket deer, respectively.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Can we save coral reefs? | Problem Solved
- Since the 1950s the world has lost half of its coral reef ecosystems.
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that with 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming above pre-industrial levels we could lose up to 90% of the world’s coral reefs.
- This amount of warming could happen in as little as six years.
- Experts say there’s still time to save coral reefs, but it’ll require swiftly addressing the three largest impacts to reefs: land-based pollution, overfishing and, most importantly, climate change.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for March 2022
- In February, Mongabay covered agroforestry among Costa Rica’s Indigenous people, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, the environmental problems of human sewage, and the unanticipated downsides of the solar energy sector in India.
- Watch a rare video where chimpanzees are seen being medical practitioners, and how dedicated rangers are protecting endangered apes in the forests along the Nigeria-Cameroon border.
- Get a peek into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

‘There’s hope’ for North Atlantic right whales: Q&A with filmmaker Nadine Pequeneza
- The documentary “Last of the Right Whales” seeks to bring the plight of these gentle giants to audiences that are largely unaware of how close to extinction the species is today.
- North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) were historically decimated by hunting, but the biggest threats to the species today are ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.
- There are an estimated 336 of the animals remaining, more than 80% of which have experienced entanglement in ropes tethered to fishing gear on the sea floor.
- Documentary director Nadine Pequeneza spoke with Mongabay about bringing these threats to public attention, the importance of engaging with and not vilifying fishers, and why she holds out hope for the whale’s future.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for February 2022
- In January, Mongabay videos explored agroforestry, sustainable solutions, a conservation project that affects local population, wildlife in the city, and more.
- Watch how a new species of penguins were discovered in Antarctica, and what an African civet does in its natural habitat.
- Get a peak into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for January 2022
- In December, the Mongabay video team covered news about illegal timber activities in Mekong, pollution and sacred groves in India, the importance of the Congo Basin peatlands, and the sea turtles’ battle against climate change.
- The premiere of our series Chasing Deforestation looked closely into the deforestation in Nigeria’s Cross River, home to critically endangered apes.
- Get a peak into the various segments of the environment across the globe. Add these videos to your watchlist for the month and watch them for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s 10 most watched videos of 2021
- Here we rewatch the ten top most watched videos of 2021 on Mongabay’s YouTube channel.
- This year, our video coverage ranged from Indigenous stories, animals caught on camera traps, explainers making environmental issues more understandable, governments and politics, climate change effects, agroecology, extractive projects, and much, much more.
- Mongabay launched a new video series on YouTube in 2021, “Problem Solved,” where we explore big, systemic, environmental issues and exa k e potential pathways to addressing them.

Mongabay Explains: Do carbon offset markets really work?
- Companies with high carbon footprints around the world have made pledges to reduce carbon emissions, aiming to become carbon neutral and even carbon negative.
- The solution they are turning to is ‘carbon offset trading,’ which allows them to invest in environmental projects as a counterweight to their carbon-emitting industrial activities.
- But carbon offset markets’ increasing popularity has met with controversy about corporations absolving themselves without contributing to an overall reduction in emissions, and questions about how they can ensure the schemes’ success without physically visiting the projects.
- In this video, Mongabay explains if carbon offset markets really do work.

‘Thousands of trees’ burned and logged in Cambodia: Q&A with filmmaker Sean Gallagher
- In 2020, filmmaker Sean Gallagher released a short film titled “Cambodia Burning,” which looks at the burning and logging of Cambodia’s forests to make way for agricultural development.
- The Cambodian government has claimed that no large-scale deforestation is happening in the country’s protected areas, but Gallagher says he filmed illegal logging taking place directly inside the confines of Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary.
- Cambodia lost an estimated 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of forest between 2001 and 2019, accounting for 26.4% of the forest cover that existed in 2000, according to a new report.
- Activists working to protect Cambodia’s remaining forests have faced threats, intimidation and incarceration.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for December 2021
- Mongabay has just launched a new video series on YouTube, “Problem Solved,” where we examine big, systemic, environmental issues and build potential pathways to addressing them.
- We continued reporting on extractive projects affecting local residents of the area as well as reforestation and rewilding efforts from different countries, this time about mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Philippines and nature-based solutions in the U.K. and in India.
- Add these videos to your watchlist for the month — you don’t need a Netflix, Prime or Disney+ subscription; watch these for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for October 2021
- In September, Mongabay covered news from India, Brazil, Mongolia, the U.S., and the oceans about agroforestry, climate change, extractive projects, and ghost fishing gear.
- We spoke to farmers about their views on agroforestry and mining in surrounding regions, and with scientists about oil palm monoculture and climate resilience using traditional knowledge.
- Add these videos to your watchlist for the month — you don’t need a Netflix, Prime or Disney+ subscription; watch these for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for September 2021
- In August, Mongabay explored sounds in Nature, the importance of homegardens, conservation of rhinos, sustainable solutions for overfishing and invasive plants, protecting forests around the world, and more.
- Researchers have found that growing biodiverse gardens at our houses is comparable with natural forested regions in the area, and that poking into rhino poop can help determine crucial information about the critically endangered animal.
- Add these videos to your watchlist for the month — you don’t need a Netflix, Prime or Disney+ subscription; watch these for free on YouTube.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for August 2021
- In the last month, Mongabay has published videos looking at the impacts of climate change on the Arctic, flamingos and beyond.
- We also covered stories around community initiatives and the history of Indigenous people in Latin America.
- You don’t need a Netflix, Prime or Disney+ subscription to watch these videos, just check out our YouTube channel.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for July 2021
- As heat waves hit all over the world, we’re bringing you environment and conservation videos you can add to your watchlist while you’re trying to stay cool in the shade.
- In the last month, Mongabay’s video teams have explored the intersection between tech and animal conservation, and community-led initiatives to protect natural spaces.
- Add these videos to your watchlist for the month — you don’t need a Netflix, Prime or Disney+ subscription; watch these for free on YouTube.

Brazil’s Uru-eu-wau-wau document COVID-19 victory with new video
- As of June 1, 2021, Brazil has confirmed more than 16.5 million COVID-19 cases and over 462,000 deaths, with devastation particularly severe among the Amazon’s Indigenous communities.
- But one Indigenous group has done an exceptional job protecting its people: The Uru-eu-wau-wau in Rondônia state sealed off their territory in March 2020 — no small feat considering that the federally demarcated territory suffers from an onslaught of invaders, including illegal miners, loggers and land grabbers.
- In a new video, shot entirely by Indigenous cinematographers and exclusive to Mongabay, the Uru-eu-wau-wau tell their own story of how they survived the pandemic for more than a year without a major case inside their territory.
- Their battle is ongoing as they continue resisting invasions of their reserve, where three highly vulnerable uncontacted Indigenous groups also live. The dismantling of Brazil’s rural health care infrastructure by the Bolsonaro administration has been particularly daunting to the Uru-eu-wau-wau during the pandemic.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for June 2021
- Does reforestation help mitigate climate change? And how effective is reforestation? In May, Mongabay delved into these questions through video explainers and on-the-ground reporting.
- In May, we also published a few behind-the-scenes videos for anyone who wants to take a peek behind the curtain and learn more about how Mongabay does its reporting.
- May was also another big month for stories on animals and new discoveries about animal behavior.
- Add these videos to your watchlist along with your favorites from Netflix, Disney+ or Prime.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for May 2021
- In April we published the result of a year-long dive into census data from Brazil that identified Indigenous populations living in cities. We interviewed people across Brazil about their experiences as Indigenous people in urban spaces.
- We published multiple videos from Indonesia on vulnerable ecosystems affected by plastic pollution and overfishing.
- As part of our ongoing explainer series, we looked at two planetary boundaries: freshwater and the ozone layer.

Mongabay’s What-To-Watch list for April 2021
- In March, Mongabay’s coverage from Latin America took a deep look at the conflicts surrounding the expansion of palm oil in Brazil.
- We published multiple videos from Southeast Asia focused on dam expansion in the Philippines.
- Our coverage of interesting species continued through our Candid Animal Cam series and through an animated video on the critically endangered Sumatran rhino.

‘The river will bleed red’: Indigenous Filipinos face down dam projects
- For more than five decades, Indigenous communities in the northern Philippines have pushed back against the planned construction of hydropower dams on the Chico River system.
- The river is of great importance to Indigenous communities in the provinces of Kalinga and Mountain Province, who call it their “river of life” and have depended on it for generations.
- The Upper Tabuk and Karayan dams have been proposed in some form or another since the 1970s, but are now backed by corporations created by Indigenous groups, causing divisions among communities.
- Critics of the dams have questioned the Indigenous consent process, a requirement for a project on tribal lands, alleging that some of the community support was obtained through bribery.

The crypto-creature from the deep: Researchers get rare video of bigfin squid
- Five squids from the Magnapinna genus, known as bigfins for their distinctive flappy fins, were spotted in deep-sea surveys over the course of three years off southern Australia.
- These cephalopods are usually found thousands of meters under the sea’s surface, in underexplored waters across the globe.
- To date, however, not a single adult specimen has been captured, and sightings are uncommon, making the newly obtained survey videos a rare window into their mysterious lives.
- Scientists believe that despite the remoteness of their habitats, these understudied creatures could still be susceptible to the impacts of a changing climate.

Video: The Sumatran rhino is sliding into extinction. It doesn’t have to
- A new animated short film from Mongabay, illustrated by artist Roger Peet, depicts the Sumatran rhino’s slide toward extinction.
- No more than 80 Sumatran rhinos are believed to survive today, scattered across isolated and fragmented habitats in Indonesia.
- Driven to the brink of extinction by habitat loss and hunting, Sumatran rhinos today face an even more fundamental threat: experts fear that too few calves are being born to offset even natural deaths in the remaining populations.

Video: In this Philippine community, women guard a marine protected area
- Women in the central Philippines have banded together to protect their marine sanctuaries from poachers and illegal fishers.
- Armed with only paddles and kayaks, these women willingly risk their lives to manage their marine protected area.
- Philippine waters are teeming with rich coral reefs and fish diversity and abundance, but protecting the seascape is challenging due to illegal fishing and climate change.

App harnesses citizen power to keep tabs on Philippines’ coral reefs
- A series of coral bleaching events have affected reefs across the Philippines in previous years, and this year alone 11 such incidents have been reported.
- But bleached reefs aren’t necessarily dead, with some still able to recover if they are resilient enough and if no further stressors come into play.
- Given that the Philippines has an estimated 33,500 square kilometers (nearly 13,000 square miles) of reefs, a volunteer group is relying on a small but growing army of citizen scientists to keep track of these bleaching incidents by submitting photos online or through an app.
- Citizen science could also help identify other threats to coral reefs, including crown-of-thorns infestation and disease outbreaks, as well as identify corals that are more resilient.

Pandemic or not, the mission to save the rare Philippine eagle grinds on
- A critically endangered Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) was rescued in the Zamboanga Peninsula in the southern Philippines during the height of the country’s COVID-19 lockdown, when all land, sea and air travel were barred.
- Despite the mobility limitations, various groups were able to exchange information and provide the much-needed proper first aid and rehabilitation for the rescued eagle, which was released back into the wild on May 20.
- There are currently seven known and identified Philippine eagles in the Zamboanga Peninsula, where there are ample protection mechanisms to support breeding eagle pairs.
- Deforestation, hunting and poaching are still the biggest threats to Philippine eagles, but recent collective efforts by various stakeholders have helped strengthen their conservation, experts say.

For nesting hawksbill turtles, this Philippine community is a sanctuary
- For centuries, hawksbill sea turtles have returned to a shoreline in the eastern Philippines to lay their eggs, even as the human community has expanded along the same stretch of beach.
- Hawksbill sea turtles’ low survival rates in the wild are caused by natural predators and, recently, exacerbated by rising sea levels. Another key threat is poaching for their meat and shells.
- Despite the lack of financial support, locals continue to look after the eggs, coming up with their own ways to protect them until the hatchlings are ready to be released back into the sea.

Averting an agricultural and ecological crisis in the Philippines’ salad bowl
- Centuries of growing highland vegetables to sustain the Philippines’ food supply has taken a toll on the farms in the Cordilleras, a mountainous region in the country’s north, which supplies 80% of vegetables in the whole archipelago.
- Farms have expanded into forest areas and affected water supply. Soil quality has likewise declined over the decades because of heavy chemical use by farms gunning for high yields.
- Government agencies have proposed solutions including agroforestry, crop programming and organic farming aimed at limiting the heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides and preventing encroachment into forested areas.
- These interventions have yet to gain momentum, but the upswing of local tourism, and the success of a local coffee farmer, have motivated some farmers to diversify their crops and plant crops alongside trees.

Marginalized voices from resource conflicts enter the mainstream via video
- The “Seeing Conflicts at the Margins” project lets communities embroiled in resource conflicts in Kenya and Madagascar share their experiences by shooting videos.
- A national launch for the videos produced under the project, funded by the U.K. government, took place at the residence of the U.K. ambassador to Madagascar on Feb. 18 in Antananarivo.
- One of the videos, shot in Antsotso village, deals with the effects of a local forest being protected by a mining company owned by mining giant Rio Tinto.
- All the videos had been screened for members of the participating communities before the national launch.

A Philippine conservation park juggles funding needs with animal welfare
- The Mari-it Wildlife and Conservation Park on the island of Panay is home to at least 62 threatened animals that are endemic to the Philippines.
- Its funding dried up in 2014, and after struggling to get by on scant resources from the local government, the park decided in June this year to open its gates to tourists.
- Since then, however, it has had to deal with numerous instances of rowdy tourists taunting the animals, highlighting the need for better management mechanisms to protect the animals under its care while still finding a way to stay financially secure.

For India’s flood-hit rhinos, refuge depends increasingly on humans
- Kaziranga National Park in India’s Assam state is home to almost 70 percent of the world’s 3,500 greater one-horned rhinos.
- The park regularly floods during monsoon season. This natural phenomenon is essential to the ecosystem, but can be deadly for animals: 400 animals died in the 2017 floods, including more than 30 rhinos. This year, around 200 animals have died so far, including around a dozen rhinos.
- With increased infrastructure and tourism development around the park, animals’ natural paths to higher ground are often blocked.
- Authorities have responded by building artificial highlands within the park. Some criticize this approach, but park officials credit the highlands for reducing the death toll of this year’s floods.

Camera trap study finds a threatened high-elevation mammal community in Peru
- A new camera trap study, the results of which were published in the journal Oryx last week, seeks to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the Cerros del Sira’s mammalian inhabitants.
- An international team of scientists from Peru and the UK led by Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a biologist at Peru’s National University of Cusco, deployed 45 camera traps from 2015 to 2016 in the Sira Communal Reserve, part of the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve.
- Aside from revealing the distribution of and threats to the Cerros del Sira’s mammal community, the results of the camera trap survey led to a number of other insights.

Omura’s whale much more widespread across the globe than previously thought
- The global range of the world’s most recently discovered large whale species is starting to come into focus — as are the man-made threats to the species.
- Salvatore Cerchio of the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts led a team that published a paper in Frontiers in Marine Science in March that includes a map of all known sightings of the elusive Omura’s whale (Balaenoptera omurai), demonstrating that the whale has a much larger range than previously thought.
- Given the new information they had about the global range of Omura’s whale, the researchers determined the whales face threats from, “at minimum, ship strikes, fisheries bycatch and entanglement, local directed hunting, petroleum exploration (seismic surveys), and coastal industrial development.”

In India, indigenous youths are filming their own forests and communities
- In India’s northeast, the Greenhub project is empowering indigenous youths to use video as a tool to forward forest conservation and social change.
- Tallo Anthony, from the project’s first batch, has been one of the most successful participants, winning several awards.
- The project strives to empower people living in remote areas of India’s northeast region, who don’t have access to technology and can’t afford to but are interested in and committed to using video as a tool for conservation.
- Greenhub also encourages women to participate, with two out of 20 seats in every batch reserved for women, and more female candidates welcome.

Graphic video reveals brutality of pangolin poaching in northeast India
- Hunters in India are helping supply the illegal pangolin trade, and new research that probes their motivations might point to measures that can reduce the poaching and sale of the species known as “the world’s most trafficked mammal.”
- An undercover video shot during the course of the research could prove to be a deterrent in and of itself, as it shows just how vicious and inhumane the pangolin trade can be.
- Interventions to reduce poverty and promote alternative livelihoods are certainly necessary, the researchers write in the study, but they argue that these measures alone would likely be ineffective in reducing pangolin hunting.

Camera trap videos help protect biodiversity of Bigal River Biological Reserve in Ecuador
- Bigal River Biological Reserve is located in the southern buffer zone of Ecuador’s Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Park, a less-explored national park that the biological reserve helps to protect, according to Thierry Garcia of the Sumac Muyu Foundation, which founded and manages the reserve.
- As part of its Bigal River Conservation Project, the Sumac Muyu Foundation has maintained camera traps in the reserve since 2014 and has collected hundreds of hours of footage showing big mammals like jaguars and tapirs as well as rare birds and other species going about their business in the foothill forests.
- The main goals of the camera trap program run by the Sumac Muyu Foundation include documenting the mammals present in the reserve and which parts of the reserve they tend to roam, as well as monitoring those mammal populations and studying variations in their behavior due to natural forest dynamics or human pressures.

Footage of elusive Negros bleeding-heart dove captured in the wild
- New footage of one of one of the most elusive birds in the world — the critically endangered Negros bleeding heart dove — has been released.
- A team with the Bristol Zoological Society, a UK-based conservation and education NGO, spent five days searching for the bird in the forests of the Philippines’ Panay Island in order to capture a video of the rarely seen species in the wild.
- The Negros bleeding-heart (Gallicolumba keayi) is a medium-sized, ground-dwelling species of pigeon endemic to the Philippine islands of Negros and Panay. There are perhaps as few as 70 and no more than 400 individuals of the species left on the two islands it calls home, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Camera trap videos capture biodiversity of conservation area in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula
- Many ejidos, such as Ejido Caoba in the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula, run sustainable forestry enterprises on their land, harvesting and selling wood for the benefit of the entire community and replanting the trees they cut down in order to ensure the health of the ecosystem as a whole.
- One way to measure how well an ecosystem has been maintained is through the levels of biodiversity the land is capable of sustaining — and by that measure, Ejido Caoba’s efforts to preserve the ecosystem appear to be quite successful, as the camera trap videos below suggest.
- After this year’s harvest of timber and non-timber forest products comes to an end, the ejido will once again install the camera traps in harvest areas in order to continue monitoring wildlife populations on their land. But for now, you can enjoy these videos captured in November and December 2017.

New short film captures rare spider monkey feeding behavior (commentary)
- A new short film captures rarely seen footage of endangered spider monkeys feeding at a mammal clay lick in the remote Peruvian Amazon.
- A Rainforest Reborn, a short documentary by filmmaker Eilidh Munro, was captured in the Crees Reserve, a regenerating rainforest within the Manu Biosphere Reserve, giving us hope that endangered species can return to previously disturbed forests.
- In this commentary, the filmmaker, Eilidh Munro, talks about the difficulties of filming spider monkeys in a rainforest and the importance of this story for conservation.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Video: Rare newborn western lowland gorilla filmed in the wild
- The baby gorilla was born on Feb. 17 in the rainforests of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, according to WCS.
- The infant is the offspring of a female gorilla named Mekome and a male silverback named Kingo, who has been studied by the WCS Congo researchers of the Mondika Gorilla Project for about two decades.
- Mekome’s newest baby is her fifth offspring, and represents hope for the species, researchers say.

WATCH: Rare sighting of mother Sunda clouded leopard and cubs caught on film
- On the afternoon of November 6, while traveling through Deramakot Forest Reserve in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo, photographer Michael Gordon came across a sight he was not expecting: a Sunda clouded leopard mother with her cubs.
- “When I first saw the clouded leopards from a distance I thought it was just some macaques on the road,” he told Mongabay. “Once I realized that it was actually three clouded leopards I stopped the car right away. I had my camera close by, but with only a 15mm macro lens attached. I wasn’t sure whether to just enjoy the moment or go into the boot of the car and change lenses. I figured I would regret it badly if I didn’t record it.”
- The Sunda clouded leopard, found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, is such a rare and elusive big cat that it’s traditionally been rather difficult to study, never mind casually sight while driving through the forest.

How much of a shock can an electric eel deliver? A scientist just found out first-hand
- Last year, Kenneth Catania, a professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, was able to corroborate a centuries-old story about electric eels leaping out of the water to shock would-be assailants.
- One advantage of leaping out of the water to zap attackers is that the eel’s electrical shock doesn’t have to travel through the water first, which causes it to dissipate and therefore pack less of a punch. But just how much of a charge can eels deliver, anyway?
- Catania has now answered that question, as well, in a study published in the journal Current Biology this month.

Video: Hatchlings boost hope for extremely rare duck
- WCS has filmed three white-winged ducklings leaving a tree-hollow in Kulen Promtep Wildlife Sanctuary (KPWS), Cambodia.
- The mother duck had herself been rescued by villagers in mid-2015 when she was injured. She was treated, rehabilitated and later returned to the wild in December 2015.
- Fewer than 1,000 mature white-winged ducks remain in the wild, and the species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

Watch a leatherback sea turtle return to the ocean after nesting on a Costa Rica beach
- While leatherback sea turtles typically do their nesting at night, a prospective mother turtle is sometimes up so late laying her eggs that she is still on the beach at sunrise.
- It’s a rare sight, but those who are lucky enough to witness it get to watch the endangered turtle slowly make her way back to the ocean before gliding off into the open water.
- Jenell Black, field manager for US- and Costa Rica-based NGO The Leatherback Trust, was conducting a morning survey on Playa Grande, the largest beach in Las Baulas National Park on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, when she was fortunate enough to observe just such a sight. And fortunately for the rest of us, she had a drone with her at the time.

“Predator Mobbing:” Watch gibbons, monkeys team up to fight off leopard
- A field team with the Borneo Nature Foundation (BNF) was in the Sabangau Forest of Central Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo studying wild Maroon Langur monkeys (Presbytis rubicunda) as part of a long-term behavioral research project when they witnessed the rare phenomenon, known as “predator mobbing,” first-hand.
- The monkeys responded after a group of Endangered Bornean White-bearded Gibbons (Hylobates albibarbis) started making alarm calls upon discovering a Sunda Clouded Leopard (Neofelis diardi) hiding in their midst.
- The two primate species then proceeded to continuously issue warning calls for over two-and-a-half hours in the direction of tangled lianas in the forest canopy in which the leopard was hiding — a cooperative, multi-species interaction that is incredibly unusual for researchers to observe in the wild.

Rare beaked whale filmed underwater for the first time
- True’s beaked whale is difficult to spot at sea, and remains a poorly studied species.
- By analyzing stranding data and live sightings of the whale, researchers confirm that the Azores and Canary Islands may actually be a hotspot for studying the natural behavior of the species.
- For the data-scarce whale species, live sightings and video recordings are highly valuable because they add to information that helps identify a species accurately.
- This in turn can help scientists monitor the status of their populations and protect them.

New population of rare Dryas monkey videotaped for the first time
- Fewer than 200 Dryas monkeys are believed to survive in the wild today.
- Videotaping the secretive monkeys was not easy.
- Researchers set up cameras on the ground, in the understory and even climbed very tall trees to attach cameras in the canopy.
- The team hopes that their camera trapping exercise will help them document where new Dryas populations live.

Watch video of baby slow loris born to mother rescued from wildlife traffickers
- Poachers had shot the pregnant loris with an airgun, and pellets were still lodged behind her right eye and in her back when the IAR medical team assessed her.
- The loris, named Canon, gave birth to her baby four days after being taken into IAR.
- Canon seems to be taking good care of her baby, IAR said, and both mother and baby are doing well.
- Two other pregnant lorises gave birth prematurely and their babies didn’t survive, IAR said.

Video: Endangered baby tapir plays with his father
- Baby Baku was born on 19 May at the RZSS Edinburgh Zoo.
- A video shows Baku trying to play with his father, Mowgli.
- Baku’s juvenile spots and stripes have recently started to fade and his coat will soon turn into a solid color of black and white or grey.

Video: Critically Endangered monkey ‘chatters’ for camera
- The Wildlife Conservation Society has launched its first full-scale camera trapping campaign in northern Sulawesi in collaboration with the Bogani Nani Wartabone National Park authority.
- Cameras have been capturing footage of rare wildlife found only in the region.
- Videos show a critically endangered black-crested macaque “chattering” at a camera and a near-threatened Sulawesi warty pig ambling past one.

New short film urges world to ‘stop the burning’
- If world leaders are serious about addressing climate change, staving off the sixth great extinction, and raising living standards of the world’s rural poor, they must ‘stop the burning’ of tropical rainforests, argues a new film.
- Directed by Jeffrey Horowitz and narrated by Jane Goodall, “Stop the Burning” intersperses stunning visual imagery of forests, wildlife, and deforestation with dozens of interviews with business, political, and civil society leaders.
- The message of the nine-minute film is simple: protecting and restoring forests is critical to slowing global warming.

Video: Rare Amur tigress with 3 cubs caught on camera
- Camera trap, set up by the Wildlife Conservation Society, captured footage of rare Amur tigress trailed by her three cubs.
- This video provides a glimmer of hope for these endangered big cats.
- WCS is also working with logging companies in the region to block logging roads around the reserve to protect the tiger populations.

Video: camera traps highlight wildlife diversity of ‘forgotten’ park

Gaur caught on camera trap in Virachey National Park. Photo by: HabitatID. Things appeared to be on the upswing in Cambodia’s vast Virachey National Park in the early 2000s. Conservation groups were surveying the area and the World Bank had committed $5 million in funds. But then the Cambodia government handed out a mining exploration […]
Video: Vet describes emotional toll of responding to brutal rhino poaching
Video by: Mic Smith. In March 2012, poachers struck Kariega Private Game Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. After darting three rhinos with veterinary immobilization drugs — a quieter tactic than firing shots — the poachers hacked the rhinos’ horns off with machetes, inflicting massive facial trauma to the immobile but unanesthetized animals. Will […]
Videos reveal rare birds, wild monkeys, and jaguar family in oil-exploited park

Sloth on all fours seeking salt. Photo courtesy of camera trap video compilation from Tiputini Biodiversity Station. A compilation of new camera trap videos from Yasuni National Park shows off rarely seen species like the rufous-vented ground cuckoo (Neomorphus geoffroyi) and the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis) as well as odd behavior, like sloths licking salt […]
Tapping into evolutionary responses to guard crops against elephants

Simple, automated speaker systems can help keep elephants out of agricultural areas Elephants in Namibia. The search for effective measures to reduce human-elephant conflict is a top priority for wildlife managers and a significant challenge. Ongoing conflict incidents exacerbate anti-wildlife sentiments among rural populations, as conflict events can lead to the deaths of both people […]
Featured video: the Uncharted Amazon trailer

Silky anteater. Photo by: Tristan Thompson. The up-coming documentary, Uncharted Amazon, promises to highlight both the little-seen wildlife and the people of the Las Piedras River region in the Peruvian Amazon, one of the most remote wildernesses on the planet. And if it’s trailer is any indication, the independent documentary will be well-worth the filmmaker’s […]
Featured video: ‘A river in dispute’ documentary explores how a planned dam in the Amazon is affecting traditional communities

Other Special Reporting Initiatives Articles by Agência Pública Dams or indigenous land: the battle over the Munduruku frontier Exclusive: Funai confirms that land threatened by dam projects belongs to indigenous tribe Nobody listened to them: fishing communities to be displaced by dams want a say in their future Here comes progress: what will planned megaprojects […]
Video: innovative tourism helps protect forests in Amazonian Peru
A new short documentary highlights the innovative, locally-grown tourist ventures sprouting up in the buffer zone around Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve. Not only do these tourist adventures–some specializing in rehabilitating wildlife, others in finding out how locals live, and some even in jungle yoga–help provide jobs and income in a region dominated by extractive industries, […]
Videos: new film series highlights bringing Gorongosa back to life

Tracking lions, photographing bats, collecting insects, bringing elephants home: it’s all part of a day’s work in Gorongosa National Park. This vast wilderness in Mozambique—including savannah and montane rainforest—was ravaged by civil war in the 1980s and 90s. However, a unique and ambitious 20-year-effort spearheaded by Greg Carr through the Gorongosa Restoration Project—and partnering with […]
Video: camera trap catches jaguar hunting peccaries

Catching a jaguar on a remote camera trap in the Amazon is a rare, happy sight. But catching a jaguar attempting to ambush a herd of peccaries is quite simply astonishing. “A research assistant, who was coding the videos sent me an email to have a look,” said primatologist, Mark Bowler, a postdoctoral fellow at […]
Video: clouded leopards and elephants grace drowned forest in Thailand

Screen shot of Asian elephants from video camera traps in Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo by: Habitat ID. Camera trap video from Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Thailand has revealed an impressive array of wildlife, including scent-marking clouded leopards and a whole herd of Asian elephant. The camera traps were set by HabitatID, an […]
Video: global carbon dispersal looks like an impressionistic painting in motion

A new video showing the global movements of carbon dioxide during one year may look beautiful, but such impressions are misleading. The video, produced by NASA, shows just how much humans are impacting the world’s atmosphere, leading to rising temperatures, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, vanishing sea ice, and untold impacts on both wildlife and human […]
Featured video: new documentary highlights ‘Sumatra Burning’

Oil palm plantation with the rainforest of Gunung Leuser National Park in the background of Sumatra. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. A new half-hour documentary investigate the impact of the palm oil industry in Indonesia, including burning forests and peatlands as well as haze spreading across Indonesian borders. Entitled Sumatra Burning, the documentary explores palm […]
Camera traps capture rare footage of wild bonobos (video)

Bonobo from still of camera trap video. Courtesy of: Terese Hart. Bonobos, our ape cousins, love peace. Unlike chimpanzees, also our close relatives, bonobos are known to resolve conflict through sex instead of aggression. They kiss, they caress, and females display genito-genital rubbing (also called G-G rubbing) to communicate, bond, and reconcile. But capturing these […]
New film highlights local resistance to Nicaragua’s canal

Locals in Bangkukuk will be forced to relocate if the Gran Canal goes ahead. Photo courtesy of Tom Miller. This fall, filmmakers Tom Miller and Nuin-Tara Key with PrettyGoodProductions found themselves in Nicaragua where they heard about a stunning project: the Gran Canal. Approved last year, the canal is meant to compete with the Panama […]
Giant stone face unveiled in the Amazon rainforest (video)

Indigenous group hopes the monument will help them protect an embattled Amazon reserve A still from the film, The Reunion, showing the Rostro Harakbut. A new short film documents the journey of an Amazonian tribe hiking deep into their territory to encounter a mysterious stone countenance that was allegedly carved by ancient peoples. According to […]
What we can learn from uncontacted rainforest tribes

Mark Plotkin speaking at TED Global in October in Brazil. If you have ever wondered about the connection between giant hallucinogenic frogs, uncontacted peoples, conservation, and climate change — and who hasn’t? — check out this TED talk from ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin: What the people of the Amazon know that you don’t. An ethnobotanist by […]
Chief Curiosity Correspondent tackles sexism, aids conservation

An interview with Emily Graslie – host of the video blog The Brain Scoop and Chief Curiosity Correspondent at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History Have you ever been offered the job of your dreams without knowing you were being interviewed? Have you ever communicated with a 5-year-old about the wonders of Salmonella? Have you […]
Featured video: new Netflix documentary highlights the work of Sylvia Earle to save the oceans

Sylvia Earle is one of the ocean’s staunchest defenders. A National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence and former chief scientist with NOAA, Earle has spent a lifetime documenting the rapid decline of the world’s oceans and calling for more action to defend the body of water that cradles the world’s continents. Her most recent undertaking, […]
Challenging the ‘tragedy of the commons’: new documentary explores how humans and nature can coexist (VIDEO)

The documentary film, “48 Cantones: The Mayan Forest,” created by brothers Thomas & Julian Moll-Rocek, explores the Mayan Cosmovision and tells the story of the 48 Cantones in their own words. It serves as a reminder of humanity’s diverse cultural heritage, and offers hope that the world can find a balance with nature. We scrambled […]
Featured video: new documentary highlights the Long March to save the Sundarbans

Last fall tens of thousands of Bangladeshis participated in a five day march that took them from the country’s capital to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest. They marched to protest the proposal to build a coal plant on the edge of the great wetland. Filmmaker, Bratto Amin, was there and just released a […]
Featured video: What would you change in conservation?

What would you change in conservation? It’s a simple question, but like so many simple quandaries it’s bound to elicit a wide diversity of answers. Recently, a pair of students in the MSc Conservation Science program at Imperial College London—Vikki Lang and Xuchang Liang—posed this question to their fellow students, recording a fascinating string of […]
Camera trap captures first ever video of rarely-seen bird in the Amazon…and much more
- Nocturnal curassow filmed in the wild for the first time: A camera trap program in Ecuador’s embattled Yasuni National Program has struck gold, taking what researchers believe is the first ever film of a wild nocturnal curassow.
- The only member of the genus, Nothocrax, the nocturnal curassow is the smallest curassow, a group of birds in the Cracidae family and distantly related to mound-building birds in Australasia.
- The nocturnal curassow is known for its booming singing at night.

Camera trap catches rare feline attempting to tackle armored prey (VIDEO)

Illustration of the African golden cat. Image by: John Gerrard Keulemans. One of the world’s least known wild cats may have taken on more than it could handle in a recent video released by the Gashaka Biodiversity Project from Nigeria’s biggest national park, Gashaka Gumti. The video, taken by remote camera trap, shows an African […]
Featured video: John Oliver skewers media ‘balance’ on climate science in viral video

Sometimes you need comedians to tell the truth. On his new show, Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver took on the poor state of media reporting on climate science. For a long time scientists have pointed out that an obsession with “balance” in U.S. news reporting has injured people’s understanding of climate science. In many […]
Featured video: elephant advocates ask Antiques Roadshow to stop appraising ivory

The 96 Elephants campaign has asked the television program, Antiques Roadshow, to stop airing appraisals of ivory, even if it is antique. To help convince the PBS program, the campaign—run by the Wildlife Conservation Society along with dozens of partners—produced a satiric video capturing not the worth of ivory, but its cost (see below). “Allowing […]
Featured video: Showtime releases first episode of major new climate change series online

Harrison Ford with orangutan in Years of Living Dangerously. Photo from: Years of Living Dangerously/Showtime. Although Showtime’s landmark new climate change series doesn’t premiere until Sunday, the network has released an edited version of the first episode of Years of Living Dangerously to the public (see below). The nine-part documentary series is being billed as […]
Featured video: celebrities speak out for Yasuni

A group of celebrities, including recent Academy Award winner Jared Leto, Law and Order‘s Benjamin Bratt, and Kill Bill‘s Daryl Hannah, have lent their voices to a new Public Service Announcement (see below) to raise signatures to protect Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park from oil drilling. Considered among the most—and quite possibly the most—biodiverse ecosystem on […]
Featured video: indigenous tribe faces loggers, ranchers, and murder in bid to save their forests

Rainforest in Panama. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. A new short film, entitled La Trocha, highlights the plight of the Wounaan people in Panama, who are fighting for legal rights to their forests even as loggers and ranchers carve it up. The conflict turned violent in 2012 when local chief, Aquilo Puchicama, was shot dead […]
Featured video: camera traps catch jaguars, anteaters, and a sloth eating clay in the Amazon rainforest

These are sights that have rarely been seen by human eyes: a stealthy jaguar, a bustling giant armadillo, and, most amazingly, a sloth slurping up clay from the ground. A new compilation of camera trap videos from Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorean Amazon shows a staggering array of species, many cryptic and rare. “The […]
Featured video: what would a world without wildlife look like?
Greenpeace today released a clever video highlighting the global biodiversity crisis with a little help from a much-beloved Disney film. While it might seem unlikely the Africa’s animals will vanish, this is exactly what’s happening in parts of the continent due to poaching, unsustainable bushmeat trade, habitat loss, massive development projects that are often poorly […]
Featured video: U.S. forests decimated for ‘green’ bio-energy in Europe
Wetland forests in the southern U.S. are becoming the victims of a drive for so-called green energy in Europe, according to activist group Dogwood Alliance, which has produced a new video highlighting the issue. The activists contend that bio-energy that depends on chopping down forests not only devastates vital ecosystems, but actually emits more greenhouse […]
New project works to raise the profile of the world’s littlest bear

The world’s least-known bear also happens to be the smallest: sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), so called for the yellowish horseshoe mark on its chest, are found across Southeast Asia. But despite their telltale markings, super-long tongues, and endearing cuteness, sun bears remain little-studied and little-known compared to many of the region’s other large mammals. Now, […]
Video: the conservation drone revolution

The use of small autonomous flying vehicles — model airplanes to hobbyists — is revolutionizing the field of conservation, enabling researchers to track wildlife, monitor for poachers, and survey inaccessible forests and reefs. Lian Pin Koh, the founder of Conservation Drones, a group which is accelerating innovation in the space, highlighted the many exciting applications […]
Video: Incredible technology maps rainforest biodiversity in 3D

Technology that enables scientists to catalogue a rainforest’s biodiversity in stunning detail by airplane was highlighted in a recent TED talk. Speaking at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland this past June, researcher Greg Asner explained the science behind his ground-breaking forest mapping platform: the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), an airplane packed with advanced chemical and […]
Could camera trap videos galvanize the world to protect Yasuni from oil drilling?

Even ten years ago it would have been impossible to imagine: clear-as-day footage of a jaguar plodding through the impenetrable Amazon, or a bicolored-spined porcupine balancing on a branch, or a troop of spider monkeys feeding at a clay lick, or a band of little coatis racing one-by-one from the dense foliage. These are things […]
Featured video: trailer for James Cameron’s new global warming series
Showtime has recently released its first trailer for the network’s new series on the impacts of global warming worldwide, entitled Years of Living Dangerously. The series, which will debut in April 2014, had employed some of America’s most well-regarded politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and actors to tell how climate change is already impacting communities around the […]
Armored giant turns out to be vital ecosystem engineer

Massive, but little-known, the giant armadillo caught on cameratrap. Photo by: Kevin Schafer/The Pantanal Giant Armadillo Project. The giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus) is not called a giant for nothing: it weighs as much as a large dog and grows longer than the world’s biggest tortoise. However, despite its gigantism, many people in its range—from the […]
Featured video: bears work together to take down camera traps

Scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have captured stunning images of Andean bear families taking down camera traps in Bolivia’s Apolobamba National Natural Area of Integrated Management. In one series of images a mother and her two cubs bite, claw, and whack one of the cameras. However even as they destroy one camera, the […]
Featured video: 22-year-old produces documentary on the Peruvian Amazon
Spending a year on the Tambopata River in Peru’s deep Amazon, allowed 22-year-old Tristan Thompson, to record stunning video of the much the region’s little seen, and little known, wildlife. Thompson, a student at the University of the West of England, has turned his footage into a new documentary An Untamed Wilderness that not only […]
Tapirs, drug-trafficking, and eco-police: practicing conservation amidst chaos in Nicaragua

An interview with Christopher Jordan, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Baird’s tapir caught on camera trap in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. Photo courtesy of: Christopher Jordan. Nicaragua is a nation still suffering from deep poverty, a free-flowing drug trade, and festering war-wounds after decades of internecine fighting. However, like any country […]
Featured video: music video honoring wildlife of Karnataka, India
Located in the southwestern corner of India, the state of Karnataka is celebrated for its stunning biodiversity. In order to honor the natural beauty of the region, wildlife photographer and filmmaker Amoghavarsha and Bangalore based musician Ricky Kej have teamed up to create a music video highlighting Karnataka’s unique species and wild places. The video […]
Featured video: ‘this is day one for the olinguito’

Last month scientists unveiled a remarkable discovery: a new mammal in the order Carnivora (even though it mostly lives off fruits) in the Andean cloud forests. This was the first new mammal from that order in the Western Hemisphere since the 1970s. The olinguito had long been mistaken for its closest relatives, olingos—small tree-dwelling mammals […]
Featured video: temperature rises across North America by 2100
A new short video predicts temperature changes across North America depending on the future of greenhouse gas emissions. Produced by NASA, the first series shows average temperatures changes (relative to 1970-1999) based on carbon dioxide levels hitting 550 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere by 2100. The second, even more dramatic series, shows changes […]
First of its kind rescue and release for sloth bear in India

For a young wild sloth bear who found himself amidst a panic-stricken village in India, rescue was fortunately, and surprisingly, close at hand. In a one-of-a-kind heartwarming story, a team from Wildlife SOS (WSOS) India – a conservation and welfare NGO – successfully rescued, treated and subsequently released the sloth bear back into the wild, […]
Featured video: Sumatra’s last elephants versus palm oil
A new video by The Ecologist documents the illegal destruction of the Leuser protected area in Sumatra for palm oil production, a vegetable oil which has become ubiquitous in many mass-produced foods and cosmetics. The destruction of the forest has pushed elephants and people together, leading to inevitable conflict with casualties on both sides. Elephants […]
How YouTube has put the world’s only poisonous primates at risk

It all started with a video: in 2009 a Russian man uploaded a video of himself tickling his exotic pet (a pygmy slow loris) from Vietnam onto the hugely popular site YouTube. Since then the video has been viewed over half a million times. But a new study in the open source journal in PLoS […]
Featured video: saving animals from the illegal pet trade in Guatemala
Found in Central America’s largest forest, the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the Guatemalan organization Arcas has rescued and rehabilitated thousands of animals since its inception in 1989. Unlike many wildlife rescue centers worldwide, Arcas focuses on rehabilitating every animal for eventually release back into the wild. This means intensive training for each species, including food gathering […]
Featured video: mangroves in El Salvador imperiled by climate change
A new short video by Friends of the Earth International highlights the impacts of climate change on mangroves in El Salvador, which local fishermen depend on for their livelihoods. Mangroves are hugely important ecosystems, acting as fish nurseries, storm buffers, and carbon storehouses, however they are vanishing worldwide due to a number of impacts including […]
Featured video: Indonesian community uses mapping to fight palm oil takeover
Communities across Indonesia are facing the questions: palm oil or no? A new short documentary Mapping our Future explores the issue through one community’s efforts in West Kalimantan to map our their ancestral lands as they attempt to take control of their future. Oil palm is a hugely productive plant that has become ubiquitous in […]
Featured video: could we rewild Britain with wolves and lions?
Environmentalist and journalist, George Mobiot, makes a passionate new plea for the controversial idea of rewilding parts of Europe in his new book Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Rewildling—a relatively recent idea—entails bringing back some of the animals (especially large ones) lost in parts of the world in order to restore […]
Featured video: Home is “slothified” after taking in 200 of these adorable rescued creatures

This video by Conservation International features an amazing woman who shares her home with over 200 rescued sloths. Monique Pool, founder of the Green Heritage Fund Suriname and CI partner, has been rescuing sloths for the past few years after an area of forest in Paramaribo, Suriname, was being cut down for raising cattle. After […]
Featured video: Rare Syrian Brown Bear caught on camera
New camera-trap footage from the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge in Armenia, has captured rare footage of a Syrian Brown Bear (Ursus arctos syriacus), a subspecies of Brown Bear native to Eurasia. This is an important recording as there may be just one or two bears in this reserve and the animals are listed as vulnerable in […]
Featured video: gorgeous golden takin caught on camera trap
The takin (Budorcas taxicolor) is a goat-antelope species that lives in the Himalayan Mountains. Takins are social bovines and are often spotted traveling in packs of 15 or more. Packs tend to be composed of female takins as the male takin is largely solitary outside of the summer rutting season. The takin is listed as […]
Featured video: a glimpse into the life of Cambodia’s Asian elephant

The Cambodian Government’s Forestry Administration has recently teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in order to peer into the daily lives of the country’s Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus). Through the use of camera traps, the organizations caught an intimate glimpse of the regular, day-to-day behavior of these animals. These remote camera trap images […]
Featured video: giant anteater wallowing and scratching like a dog
Scientists have recently taken rare and incredible footage of a giant anteater with a camera trap in the Barba Azul Nature Reserve of Bolivia. This footage captures a giant anteater wallowing in a pit of mud. The animal lies down, rolling around and scratching itself, for a period of, what seems to be, over a […]
Featured video: saving sea turtles in Mexico’s Magdalena Bay
A new short film, Viva la tortuga documents the struggle to save loggerhead and green sea turtles in Magdalena Bay, Mexico. Once a region for a massive sea turtle meat market, the turtles now face a new threat: bycatch. Loggerhead sea turtles are drowning in bottom-set gillnets, unable to escape from the nets once entangled. […]
Featured video: How climate change is messing with the jetstream
Weather patterns around the globe are getting weirder and weirder: heat waves and record snow storms in Spring, blasts of Arctic air followed by sudden summer, record deluges and then drought. Climate change due to fossil fuels emissions has risen the global temperature by 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last century, impacting […]
Featured video: camera trapping in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park
A new video highlights the work of Badru Mugerwa as he sets and monitors 60 remote camera traps in one of the most rugged tropical forests on Earth: Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. Mugerwa is working with the TEAM Network, run by Conservation International, which monitors mammal and bird populations in 16 protected tropical […]
Featured video: If I were a panda…
A new powerful video by the conservation program, APES, highlights the threat faced by many species: not being cute enough. The creative short video was produced pro bono by Ogilvy & Mather Chicago. “The mission of APES is to raise awareness around all endangered animals, versus putting the emphasis on just one particular species,” said […]
Featured documentary: Damocracy, highlighting the battles over the Belo Monte and Ilisu dams
A new short documentary, Damocracy, highlights the battles over monster dam projects imperiling local people and wild rivers. Examining the Belo Monte dam in Brazil and the Ilisu dam in Turkey, the documentary argues that such hydroelectric projects cannot be deemed “green” energy as they overturn lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems. Developing countries are turning to […]
Featured video: time to meet The Lonely Dodo

A new short animation (see below) highlights the plight of today’s most endangered species by focusing on one which is already extinct: the dodo. The animation, produced by Academy award-winning studio Aardman, introduces the world to the last, and very lonely, dodo. The short was created for conservation organization, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, which […]
Featured video: Earth Day message from indigenous tribes in the Peruvian Amazon
A new video by Alianza Arkana includes an Earth Day message from the indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon who are facing the existential threats of logging and fossil fuel development on their traditional lands. Alianza Arkana, which means ‘Protection Alliance,’ advocates for indigenous people in Peru within the legal system, develops community-based projects, and […]
Featured video: local communities successfully conserve forests in Ethiopia

A participatory forest management (PFM) program in Ethiopia has made good on forest preservation and expansion, according a recent article and video interview (below) from the Guardian. After 15 years, the program has aided one community in expanding its forest by 9.2 percent in the last decade, while still allowing community access to forest for […]
Featured video: stemming human-caused fires in the Amazon
A new series of 5 films highlights how people use fire in the Amazon rainforest and how such practices can be mitigated. Collectively dubbed “Slash & Burn” each film explores a different aspect of fire-use in the Amazon. In recent years the Amazon has faced unprecedented droughts, possibly linked to climate change and vast deforestation, […]
Featured video: in-depth look at Madagascar’s Ranomafauna National Park

A new film Nosy Maitso takes a look at the people, researchers, and wildlife connected to Madagascar’s Ranomafauna National Park. Apart of a World Heritage Site, the park was established in 1991 after a new species of lemur, the golden bamboo lemur (Hapalemur aureus), was discovered in its forests in the 1980s. The golden bamboo […]
Featured video: rare, strange mammal caught on camera in Sumatra

A video camera trap expedition into Sumatra’s Leuser ecosystem has captured a rarely-seen, bizarre mammal on tape. The Sumatran serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) is a goat-antelope found both on Sumatra and mainland Southeast Asia. Rarely seen and little-studied, the animals inhabit highland areas. “Serows seem to be rare creatures, we only filmed two individuals. But they […]
Featured video: moving green, local energy forward in Southeast Asia

Rainforest in Sabah, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. A new video highlights the work and drive of renewable energy proponents at the inaugural meeting of Southeast Asia Renewable Energy People’s Assembly (SEAREPA) in the Malaysian state of Sabah. Held last year, the meeting brought together 80 organizations from 12 […]
Featured video: Saving the Amazon through maps
In a new video ethnobotanist, Mark Plotkin, talks about recent—and historical—efforts to preserve the Amazon rainforest through map-making and technology. Today scientists like Plotkin are teaching indigenous people how to digitally map their territory to win land rights over the forest they’ve used for centuries. Nearly 20 percent of the Amazon has been lost due […]
Jaguars, tapirs, oh my!: Amazon explorer films shocking wildlife bonanza in threatened forest

Watching a new video by Amazon explorer, Paul Rosolie, one feels transported into a hidden world of stalking jaguars, heavyweight tapirs, and daylight-wandering giant armadillos. This is the Amazon as one imagines it as a child: still full of wild things. In just four weeks at a single colpa (or clay lick where mammals and […]
Catching Borneo’s mysterious wild cats on film

Marbled cat. Photo courtesy of: Jyrki Hokkanen. In my childhood’s biology books from the 50’s, the Australian marsupial tiger Thylacine is classified rare but alive. Today we know that the last thylacine died in a Tasmanian zoo 7th September, 1936, after a century of intensive hunting encouraged by bounties. The local government had finally introduced […]
WWF and National Geographic ask: ‘How much stuff do you need?’

Seven billion people inhabit the planet and all require food and water, but less than one percent of the water found on the planet is fresh and accessible and 70 percent of that goes to growing crops. Meanwhile temperatures are rising worldwide due to the overuse of fossil fuel energy. Given these issues, a new […]
From slash-and-burn to Amazon heroes: new video series highlights agricultural transformation

Dan Childs filming in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo courtesy of Nick Werber. A new series of short films is celebrating the innovation of rural farmers in the Manu region of Peru. Home to jaguars, macaws, and tapirs, the Manu region is also one of the top contenders for the world’s most biodiverse place. It faces […]
Featured video: the miracle of mangroves
Mangroves are among the most important ecosystems in the world: they provide nurseries for fish, protect coastlines against dangerous tropical storms, mitigate marine erosion, store massive amounts of carbon, and harbor species found no-where else. However, they are vanishing at astonishing rates: experts say around 35 percent of the world’s mangroves were lost in just […]
Cute koalas have become ‘urban refugees’

The 3rd Annual New York Wildlife Conservation Film Festival (WFCC.org) runs from January 30 – February 2, 2013. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com is running a series of Q&As with filmmakers and presenters. For more interviews, please see our WCFF feed. Jimmy, an orphan whose mother was rundown by a car, is the star of […]
Landmines, chains, and hope: the elephants of Thailand

The 3rd Annual New York Wildlife Conservation Film Festival (WFCC.org) runs from January 30 – February 2, 2013. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com is running a series of Q&As with filmmakers and presenters. For more interviews, please see our WCFF feed. Baby elephant who lost apart of her leg to a landmine. Image courtesy of […]
Giant squid caught on video

Scientists come face-to-face with giant squid. Photo of a giant squid captured in 2004. Photo by: Dr Tsunemi Kubodera, of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, and Kyoichi Mori, of the Ogaswara Whale Watching Association. Last summer, after 55 dives, three scientists in a submarine off the coast of Japan encountered an animal people have […]
Rare jungle cat filmed for only the second time
A biologist on vacation in Malaysian Borneo caught one of the world’s rarest cats on video for only the second time, reports the BBC. Jyrki Hokkanen, a Finnish biologist, in August filmed a wild Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) in Danum Valley, an area of protected rainforest in Sabah. He was on a night walk […]
Featured video: turning yards and neighborhoods into wildlife habitat
A new animation by the American Society of Landscape Architects introduces viewers to the benefits of making their yards and neighborhoods wildlife friendly. By focusing on the threat of sprawl to biodiversity, the video shows how urban and suburban residents can use native plants, freshwater, and wildlife-friendly structures to allow a space for nature, and, […]
Featured video: how locals depend on Kalimantan’s vanishing forests
A new video explores local indigenous views of the forests of Kalimantan or Indonesian Borneo. Having depended on the rainforest ecosystems for centuries, indigenous groups now find themselves under pressure to exploit forest for logging, coal mining, or industrial plantations. While biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem services are at stake, the forests are also […]
Featured video: on-the-ground look at Brazil’s fight against deforestation
A new video by the Guardian takes an on-the-ground look at Brazil’s efforts to tackle deforestation in the Amazon. Using satellite imagery, an elite team of enforcement agents are now able to react swiftly to illegal deforestation. The crackdown on deforestation has been successful: destruction of the Amazon has slowed by around 75 percent in […]
Conflict and perseverance: rehabilitating a forgotten park in the Congo

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s last herd of zebra run free in Upemba. Photo courtesy of the FZS. Zebra racing across the yellow-green savannah is an iconic image for Africa, but imagine you’re seeing this not in Kenya or South Africa, but in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Welcome to Upemba National Park: […]
Featured video: Chasing Ice trailer
A new film, opening in the U.S. in November, follows the exploits of National Geographic photographer, James Balog, as he attempts to photograph the end of glaciers and great ice sheets, which are diminishing and, in some cases, collapsing under the heat of global climate change. Chasing Ice, which won a cinematography award at Sundance, […]
Tiger and cubs filmed near proposed dam in Thailand
A tigress and two cubs have been filmed by remote camera trap in a forest under threat by a $400 million dam in Thailand. To be built on the Mae Wong River, the dam imperils two Thai protected areas, Mae Wong National Park and Huay Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, according to the World Wide Fund […]
Featured video: a Sumatran rhino love story
Efforts to save the Sumatran rhino in Borneo have sped up ever since the capture of Puntung last Christmas. A female rhino, who lost one foot to a snare, Puntung represents the first viable mate for Tam, a male rhino who has been kept in a large rainforest enclosure since his rescue in an oil […]
Featured video: restoring rivers in the Tongass Rainforest
A new video highlights recent efforts to restore rivers in the Tongass Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. Industrial logging in vital watersheds have hurt salmon populations and other wildlife in the region, an issue the government, along with several partners, are now trying to rectify. The salmon industry in the region is worth […]
Featured video: see the world from the eyes of a cormorant

Imperial cormorant in Patagonia. Photo courtesy of WCS. Scientists have succeeded in capturing amazing footage of the imperial cormorant (Phalacrocorax atriceps) diving 150 feet below the ocean’s surface—and it’s from the bird’s point of view! Attaching a small camera to an imperial cormorant, scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the National Research Council […]
Featured video: climate change bringing on the extremes
Focusing on extreme weather events in the U.S. this summer, a new compilation video highlights the connection between climate change and increasing and worsening extremes, such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods. Includes interviews with several climatologists and other experts. While scientists say it is difficult to directly link a single weather event to climate change, […]
Clever whale shark video goes viral

Brent Stewart tags a whale shark with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag in Indonesia. Photo: © CI/Mark Erdmann. Researchers have a caught a juvenile—though still massive—whale shark on camera sucking fish out of a hole in an Indonesian fishing net. Posted on YouTube.com, the video has gone viral and has been viewed by 1.2 million […]
Featured video: the Rio speech heard round the world

Cattle ranches carve into the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. As world leaders, officials, NGOs, businesses, and experts gather in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Summit on Sustainable Development, or more well known as Rio+20, it might be useful to look at the landmark Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which […]
Featured video: baby hornbills grow up in a jar
A researcher in Malaysia has captured footage of Oriental pied hornbills (Anthracoceros albirostris) raising chicks in an earthen jar in the Kenyir rainforest of Malaysia. The first video shows the father Oriental pied hornbill feeding the chicks, while the second shows a chick leaving its nest. “Besides a mixture of fruit, we have seen bats, […]
Cute animal picture (and video) of the day: baby otters

Three baby North American river otters at the Prospect Zoo. Photo by: Julie Larsen Maher. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Prospect Park Zoo in New York City has recently seen the arrival of three baby North American river otters (Lontra canadensis), the first born in the city at a zoo or aquarium in over 50 years. […]
Video: Logging activist shot in Cambodia; big paper companies in Indonesia may face lawsuit
In this post, Rob Little provides his video version of Mongabay’s environmental news for the week of April 30. STORY 1: Cambodian activist Chut Wutty was shot dead by military police at an illegal logging site last week. His death is a tragic casualty in the conflict arising between aggressive logging companies and communities dependent […]
Featured video: why one scientist is getting arrested over climate change
In March 2012 the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and well-known climatologist, James Hansen, spoke at a TED conference to explain what would push a 70-year-old scientist to participate in civil disobedience against mountaintop coal mining and the Keystone Pipeline, even leading to several arrests. In his talk, Hansen outlines the basics […]
Featured video: the oceans and Rio+20
A new video by Pew Environment Group and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hopes to convince policy-makers attending the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development this summer that urgent action is needed to save the ocean’s from an environmental crisis. The video highlights what an ocean in 2050 might look like if world governments courageously […]
First camera trap video of world’s rarest gorilla includes shocking charge

Captive Cross River gorilla at Limbe Wildlife Center, Limbe, Cameroon. Photo by: Julie Langford. Ever wonder what it would be like to be charged by a male gorilla? A new video (below) released by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), gives one a first hand look. Shot in Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary, the video is the […]
Video documents nearly all the world’s remaining Javan rhinos
Nearly all the world’s remaining Javan rhino have been documented on video via camera traps in Indonesia’s Ujung Kulon National Park, according to a montage put together by park authorities. The footage shows 35 individual Javan rhinos roaming the forests of Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park, the last refuge for a species believed to number […]
Featured video: climate, water, and desperation in Texas
As a part of PBS’ new series Coping with Climate Change reporters visit several towns in Texas which has suffered unprecedented drought beginning in 2010. The drought, which climatologists say is consistent with climate change predictions, has led to forest fires, vast tree mortalities, agricultural and livestock losses, and water shortages. A government report in […]
Video: All white killer whale spotted in Russia
Scientists in Russia have captured the first-known video footage of an all-white killer whale. The male orca, dubbed “Iceberg”, was sighted during a research trip off Kamchatka. Iceberg seems to be treated normally by other whales in its pod, according to Erich Hoyt, an orca scientist who was co-leading the trip when the sighting was […]
Featured video: How to save the Amazon
The past ten years have seen unprecedented progress in fighting deforestation in the Amazon. Indigenous rights, payments for ecosystem services, government enforcement, satellite imagery, and a spirit of cooperation amongst old foes has resulted in a decline of 80 percent in Brazil’s deforestation rates. A new video Hanging in the Balance by the Skoll Foundation […]
Featured video: Google Earth highlights imperiled coral reefs around the world
A new video by Google Earth and the World Resources Institute (WRI) highlights the world’s many endangered coral reefs. A part of the WRI’s Reefs at Risk program, the video highlights regional and global threats to the oceans’ most biodiverse ecosystem. According to the WRI, a stunning 75 percent of the world’s reefs are currently […]
Featured video: the world’s greatest turtle collection
At a seemingly small residence in Florida, lives the world’s greatest turtle collection. The Chelonian Research Institute contains a specimen of nearly every species of turtle found worldwide and many live species. Founded and headed by Dr. Peter Pritchard, the institute is both a research center and an active museum. Pritchard has spent his career […]
Featured video: wild Sumatran elephants on camera trap video
A video camera trap project called Eyes on Leuser has captured wonderful footage of a very curious herd of Sumatran elephants (Elephas maximus sumatranus) in the island’s Leuser ecosystem (see below). The project has already documented a wealth of species, including imperiled and elusive animals like the Sumatran tiger, marbled cat, and white-winged duck. Given […]
Featured video: Peaceful Walks, nature to soothe the soul
Recent research has shown that time spent in nature can have beneficial psychological effects. Renowned filmmaker and conservationist, David Attenborough has stated that nature “keeps us sane.” A new website, Peaceful Walks, highlights the calming power of nature through short videos, free of charge. The website also hopes to raise funds for conservation.
Featured video: the battle for Tripa is about people too
Environmentalists have largely focused on the plight of orangutans as fires burn in Aceh, Sumatra to clear rainforest for a hugely controversial palm oil plantation, however as the video above highlights, local people will also feel the impacts of the destruction of forest for palm oil. Last year, Aceh’s governer Irwandi Yusuf issued a permit […]
“Don’t be so silly” about climate change: Mohamed Nasheed on The Daily Show

Former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed speaking to reporters at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. Photo by: Adam Welz. Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives, told the world on The Daily Show Monday night: “Just don’t be so silly” about climate change. Nasheed, who in February was forced to resign his presidency, […]
Featured video: Honoring Wangari Maathai, who would have been 72 yesterday
The indomitable Wangari Maathai would have turned 72 yesterday, April 1st, 2012. Maathai, who was the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win a Nobel Peace Prize (in 2004), passed away last September. Founder of the Green Belt Movement, Maathai spent her life working to save Kenya’s forests, uplift the country’s women, and […]
Featured video: indigenous community witnesses end of forest for palm oil
Muara Tae Diaries from EIA on Vimeo. Forests are falling across Borneo. A new videoblog by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Telepak have documented the loss of one such forest in Indonesian Borneo, and its impact on the indigenous Dayak Benuaq people. Tensions hit a high point last year as PT Munte Waniq Jaya […]
Featured Video: FEVER, the climate change challenge for indigenous people
Fever Trailer (English Subtitles) from LifeMosaic on Vimeo. Four short films have been produced highlighting the challenges of climate change for indigenous people in the tropics. Produced by LifeMosaic, the indigenous rights organization says the films are “designed to inform and empower indigenous communities across the tropics and to be a tool for grass-roots facilitators, […]
Featured Video: the true cost of the tar sands
What’s the big deal about the tar sands? Canadian photographer Garth Lenz presents the local environmental and social concerns presented by the tar sands in a concise, impassioned speech in a TEDx talk in Victoria, Canada. The tar sands has recently moved from a primarily Canadian issue into an international one as activists in the […]
Featured Video: new family of legless amphibians discovered
Researchers exploring northeast India have discovered a new family of legless amphibians, known as caecilians. Although caecilians superficially resemble giant earthworms, they are in fact vertebrates and are most closely related to their amphibian kin, frogs and salamanders. The new family, dubbed Chikilidae after a local tribe, includes at least three, maybe six, new species. […]
Featured Video: logging run amuck in Latvia
A recent expose by Al Jazeera reveals the environmental toll of clear-cutting on Latvia’s forests, in addition to highlighting the fact that the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certifies clear-cut forests. The FSC responded shortly afterward that it did not re-certify logging in Latvia as reported in the expose. However, the FSC is currently in the […]
Featured video: scientists capture first footage of Shepherd’s beaked whale
Scientists have captured what is believed to be the world’s first footage of the cryptic Shepherd’s beaked whale (Tasmacetus shepherdi), one of a number of beaked whale species about which scientists know almost nothing. The footage was taken in Bass Strait, lying between Australia and Tasmania. There have only been a few confirmed sightings of […]
Featured video: NASA releases shocking 30 second film on climate
NASA has created a new animation showing regional temperature changes on a map of the Earth from 1880-2011. On the map, blues represent temperatures lower than baseline averages, while reds indicate temperatures higher than the average. As the 131 years pass, the map turns from bluish-white to increasingly yellow and red. Caused by the burning […]
Featured video: music in Madagascar to protest illegal logging
A new video highlights the plight of Madagascar’s protected tropical forests, which are falling prey to illegal logging and foreign contractors. Featuring Razia Said, Malagasy singer and songwriter, the video shows concerts to raise awareness about illegal logging, especially near Maosala National Park. Said has recently founded the group Musicians Against Illegal Logging to support […]
Featured video: tuna industry bycatch includes sea turtles, dolphins, whales
WARNING: video is graphic. A Greenpeace video, using footage from a whistleblower, shows disturbing images of the tuna industry operating in the unregulated waters of the Pacific Ocean. Using fish aggregation devices (FADs) and purse seine nets, the industry is not only able to catch entire schools of tuna, including juvenile, but whatever else is […]
Featured holiday video: Oh, what a wonderful world!
The celebrated David Attenborough introduces us, once again, to the wonders of the world. Happy holidays from mongabay.com to you and yours! And best wishes for 2012.
Camera trap videos capture stunning wildlife in Thailand

The Endangered peafowl on camera trap. Photo by: DNP-Government of Thailand/WCS Thailand Program. A year’s worth of camera trap videos (see photos and video below) are proving that scaled-up anti-poaching efforts in Thailand’s Western Forest Complex are working. Capturing rare glimpses of endangered, elusive animals—from clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa) to banteng (Bos javanicus), a rarely […]
Featured video: documentary on logging mafia
A new documentary, The Real Chainsaw Massacre, follows the corrupt and violent black market of illegal timber trading in Vietnam. The documentary highlights the efforts of undercover investigators with the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) working to expose the lucrative trade of illegal logging from Laos to Vietnam. A trade that is not only decimating forests […]
Featured video: saving baby orphaned sloths
The world’s only sloth sanctuary works to save orphaned and injured sloths in Costa Rica. A recent short film (below) by Lucy Cooke highlights a few of the stars of the sloth sanctuary. Cooke has a new hour long film debuting on Animal Planet on December 17th at 8 PM EST, following the adventures of […]
Featured video: are hydroelectric dams a solution to climate change?
A new video from NGOs International Rivers and Friends of the Earth International argues that a spree of dam building in the tropics is a false solution to the climate crisis. The video has been released to coincide with the UN’s 17th Climate Summit now beginning in Durban, South Africa. With precipitation becoming less assured […]
Featured video: world’s only video of extinct 2-foot-long imperial woodpecker
Newly-discovered video has brought the extinct imperial woodpecker (Campephilus imperialis) back to life—at least for a few seconds. Once the world’s largest woodpecker (even bigger than the ivory-billed woodpecker, which may also be extinction), the imperial woodpecker vanished after it’s native old-growth pine forest habitat in Mexico was logged. It also suffered widespread hunting for […]
Featured video: camera traps catch Andean cats and others in Argentina
Camera traps set up in the Jujuy Province of Argentina have captured rare images of the elusive and playful Andean cat and Pampas cat, along with other South American wildlife, including vizcachas, culpeo foxes, and skunks. Before 1998, there were only two photos of a wild Andean cats, today conservation attention along with camera traps […]
Featured video: could a forest be worth more than a gold mine?
Jason A. Sohigian, the Deputy Director of the Armenia Tree Project (ATP), presents at TEDx on the often-unacknowledged economic value of forests, including wildlife habitat, safeguarding watersheds, soil health, and tourism. In Amerina, Sohigian estimates the economic value of forests to be between $7 million to $1.1 billion annually, if not more. “I’m suggesting that […]
Featured video: the fungi photographer
Of all of the Earth’s multitude of lifeforms, fungi may get the least respect. Including mushrooms, molds, and yeasts, around 100,000 species have been described to date, yet hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, remain unnamed. Taylor Lockwood, featured here in a Growing Bolder profile, is an American fungi photographer who focuses on capturing the […]
Featured video: conservation challenges in Kenya
Paula Kahumbu, National Geographic Emerging Explorer and Executive Director of WildlifeDirect, speaks on the problems facing conservation in Kenya, including poverty, human-wildlife conflict, and development. Kahumbu gave the speech at the Explorers Week at National Geographic. To read a recent commentary by Kahumbu: Kenya should embrace living with nature as the model for a healthier, […]
Featured video: Arctic ice melt creates mass walrus ‘haul-outs’
The disintegration of the Arctic sea ice, which hit the second lowest record this year, is forcing a number of Arctic animals to change their behavior. The footage below is of thousands of walrus hauling out of the water onto shore land to rest. In years past, these walruses would’ve spent this time foraging in […]
Featured video: new documentary puts human face on logging in Papua New Guinea
A new documentary, filmed single-handily by filmmaker David Fedele, covers the impact of industrial logging on a community in Papua New Guinea. Entitled Bikpela Bagarap (or ‘Big Damage’ in English), the film shows with startling intimacy how massive corporations, greedy government, and consumption abroad have conspired to ruin lives in places like Vanimo, Papua New […]
Featured video: Sumatran species spring to life on video camera traps
New video camera trap footage has revealed the stunning and often hidden biodiversity of Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem, the only place in the world inhabited by elephants, orangutan, tigers, and rhinos. The video camera trap project, dubbed Eyes on Leuser, has captured 26 species to date using 10 video cameras, including astounding footage of a sniffing […]
Featured video: the Caribbean’s last mammals
Although they are little-known, the hutia and solenodon are some of the last surviving mammals of the Caribbean. A hefty rodent, the hutia spends its time grazing in trees like a giant arboreal hamster. While, the solenodon may be one of the world’s oddest creatures: a ‘living fossil’, the solenodon’s evolutionary origins goes back all […]
Featured video: debating the tar sands pipeline as arrests mount
As arrests during a two week long civil action against the Keystone Pipeline XL in Washington DC rose to nearly 600 people, Bill McKibben, head of 350.org, and Robert Bryce, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, debated the issue on PBS. While activists oppose the massive pipeline (from Canada to Texas) for a variety of reasons, […]
One of world’s rarest cats caught on video for the first time

One of the first handheld photos of a living, wild African golden cat. Gabon, 2003. Photo by: Philipp Henschel/Panthera. Africa is known as a continent of felines: leopards, cheetahs, servals, caracals, and of course the one who wears the crown, the lion. But, few people travel to Africa to see, or have probably ever heard […]
Big damage in Papua New Guinea: new film documents how industrial logging destroys lives

Douglas cutting tree in Papua New Guinea. Photo by: David Fedele. In one scene a young man, perhaps not long ago a boy, named Douglas stands shirtless and in shorts as he runs a chainsaw into a massive tropical tree. Prior to this we have already heard from an official how employees operating chainsaws must […]
Featured video: WWF’s Astonish Me
Highlighting new species recently discovered around the world, the short film Astonish Me, was created as apart of a happy 50th birthday celebration for conservation organization WWF. “Astonish Me shows that the natural world is every bit as magical and surprising as the fictional world you might see in a Hollywood film. We know about […]
Featured video: Trouble in Lemur Land
A new film, Trouble in Lemur Land, showcases the Critically Endangered silky sifaka (Propithecus candidus). With only 300-2,000 silky sifaka’s surviving in the wild, this large and distinct lemur is considered one of the top 25 most endangered primates in the world. Primatologist, Erik Patel told mongabay.com that the film took months of filming in […]
Video: Tiger trapped in Asia Pulp and Paper logging concession dies a gruesome death

Dying tiger. Courtesy of Greenpeace. Caught in a snare and left for days without access to food and water, a wild Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) perished from its wounds hours after forest officers reached it. As reported by Greenpeace—which photographed and filmed the rescue attempt—the tiger was trapped at the edge of a acacia […]
Video: camera trap proves world’s rarest rhino is breeding

A Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) captured on a camera trap browses for food. Javan rhinos are herbivores and eat around 110 lbs of food daily. Photo courtesy of WWF. There may only be 40 left in the world, but intimate footage of Javan rhino mothers and calves have been captured by video-camera trap in Ujung […]
Back from extinction: Tasmanian tiger caught on video?

A 9 second video released today on YouTube claims to show a living Tasmanian tiger. The footage was captured by Murray McAllister last year. McAllister says he has seen the believed-to-be-extinct Tasmanian tiger several times in the last few years. While the full video is over 8 minutes long, McAllister has only released a preview. […]
Video: Amazon deforestation falls, degradation soars in Sept
Brazil development bank to fund ag emissions reductions Brazil’s national development bank, BNDES, launched a 1 billion reais fund to finance projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. The program will provide low interest loans to farmers and cooperatives for reforestation, integrated forest-agriculture projects, and recovery of degraded agricultural land. The bank says […]
Video: Dutch to ban unsustainable palm oil by 2015

Mongabay.com’s Rhett Butler reviews what happened this week in forest news Dutch to use only certified palm oil by 2015 The Netherlands has committed to only using palm oil certified under the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil or RSPO by 2015, providing a boost for the certification standard which aims to improve the social and […]
Video: Biodiversity gets a boost

Biodiversity conference closes Speaking at the UN’s biodiversity meeting in Nagoya, Japan, actor Harrison Ford criticized the failure of the United States to sign the Convention for Biological Diversity. The actor, famous for his roles in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, told CNN he was “embarrassed” the US was not yet a signatory to the […]
Video: Wal-mart takes on deforestation
Week in Forests, Oct 22, 2010 Biodiversity conference opens Delegates representing 192 nations gathered in Nagoya, Japan for the meeting of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. The CBD aims to curb biodiversity loss, but expectations are low for this particular meeting. Nevertheless a spate of reports was released during the first days of the […]
Video: New carnivorous swamp beast discovered in Madagascar

Week in Forests, Oct 15, 2010 Death toll rises in New Guinea flash floods linked to deforestation The death toll from flash floods in Wasior, West Papua has now topped 150. Environmentalists say heavy logging in the region contributed to the disaster, which blocked access to the town. Some of the injured were evacuated by […]
Video: Global deforestation slows
Green party candidate Marina Silva captured 19 percent of the vote in Brazil’s presidential election, shocking analysts and forcing a run-off. Silva, a former rubber tapper who was illiterate until the age of 16, advocates stronger protection of the Amazon rainforest. = = = = = Global forest loss slowed to 13 million hectares per […]
Video: Forest report for Oct 1, 2010
The top forest news story of the week was the deepening conflict between Asia Pulp & Paper, an Indonesia based forestry company, and Greenpeace, an activist group. On Monday APP published a report claiming to exonerate it from charges that it illegally cleared rainforest and peatlands in Sumatra, an Indonesian island. The report was published […]

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