Tag Archives: conservation

The dark spaces beneath the conifers make it feel as if the mountain bikers are emerging from nowhere. Racing down the hill, they slalom perilously close to the trees, bouncing over roots, rocks, and purpose-built jumps, their progress punctuated by the occasional, adrenaline-fueled whoop of delight. This is Bike Park …

A switch is flicked, and a pharmacy sign flickers to life with a green glare. But this clinic prescribes seeds, not pills. The glass jars lining the shelves of this compact unit in central Plymouth, on the south coast of England, are filled with cow parsley, red clover, and corn …

De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments. To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s …

This story originally appeared on Grist. It was produced by Grist and co-published with Fresnoland. It is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The land of the Central Valley works hard. Here in the heart of California, in the most productive farming region in the United States, almost every square …

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting …

One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick …

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The …

This story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, …

This story originally appeared in High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On July 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish …

There’s much, much more to the rainforest than meets the eye. Even a highly trained observer can struggle to pick out individual animals in the tangle of plant life—animals that are often specifically adapted to hide from their enemies. Listen to the music of the forest, though, and you can …