African elephants could be extinct within 15 years because of the illegal ivory trade, conservation experts have warned. By Amy Willis The population – currently 600,000 – is diminishing by 38,000 each year. These figures, calculated using the annual number of illegal tusk seizures, significantly exceed elephant birth rates meaning the species could face extinction […]
Malta is an important way-point for birds migrating between Europe and Africa. But the spring and autumn migrations attract illegal hunters, who pick off the birds as they fly overhead. There has been a huge rise in illegal hunting in recent years, prompting conservationist group BirdLife Malta to set up camps to deter illegal hunters. […]
(a) Protected and unprotected forests in 1990 for the main island of Sumatra and the smaller island of Siberut, including adjacent unprotected land lying within 10 km of protected area (PA) boundaries and the wider unprotected landscape, and showing the spatial distribution of the 1264 sample cells (25 km2). (b) Remaining forests in 2000, deforestation […]
By Paula Alvarado, Buenos Aires on 10.16.09 We’re talking about deforestation in the Amazon all the time, but can we really understand the magnitude of what we’re saying? This is where an image is worth a thousand words: this is how a 15 tons, 40 meters tall, ¡250! years of age, fallen tree from the […]
By Tomasz Johnson, special to mongabay.com A chainsaw chugs into life and tears into the trunk of a tree as tall as a two-storey house. Petrol and man work together as the chain sets its teeth into the wood and edges its way through. The tree creaks, leans, and falls with a great crash to […]
Antananarivo (AFP) Oct 9, 2009 – Environmental groups are protesting the resumption of exports of precious woods from Madagascar, arguing that the wood is logged illegally and that the island’s forests are being destroyed. On September 21 a government decree “temporarily” legalised the export of “certain stocks” of precious woods, citing the need to “evacuate […]
The catastrophic decline around the world of ‘apex’ predators such as wolves, cougars, lions or sharks has led to a huge increase in smaller ‘mesopredators’ that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions, a new study concludes. The findings, published today in the journal Bioscience, found that in North America all of the largest terrestrial […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2009) — Conservationists trying to prevent the extinction of Northern Bald Ibis Geronticus eremita are distraught that one of the last remaining wild birds in the Middle East has been shot by a hunter in Saudi Arabia, bringing the known wild Middle Eastern population of this Critically Endangered species to just four […]
By Philippe Naughton, From Times Online, September 22, 2009 The BBC wildlife expert Chris Packham has questioned the millions spent trying to save the giant panda from extinction and suggested that the bamboo-eating bear should be allowed to die out “with a degree of dignity”. The zoologist, who has replaced Bill Oddie as a presenter […]
By Jeremy Hance In a decline on par with that suffered by the American bison in the Nineteenth Century, in the 1990s the saiga antelope of the Central Asian steppe plummeted from over one million individuals to 50,000, dropping a staggering 95 percent in a decade and a half. Since then new legislation and conservation […]
