With information moving faster than ever, the public’s need for credible, accessible environmental reporting has never been greater. In response, Mongabay has launched its Newswire Desk, specializing in short, written and multimedia content that brings news from nature’s frontline to non-specialist audiences.

“Improving access to information isn’t only accomplished by publishing online for free. It’s achieved by providing information that satisfies audiences’ needs and adapts to their constraints,” says Willie Shubert, Mongabay’s executive editor and VP of programs. “The purpose of the Newswire Desk is to meet people where they are and inspire their curiosity to learn more.”

The Newswire Desk enables Mongabay to cover significantly more news about environmental science, the ecosystems people interact with daily, and the links between current events and Nature. “The Newswire Desk has a mandate to use plain, direct language to break through jargon and quickly identify how people’s daily lives are connected to the environmental issues Mongabay covers in depth,” Shubert says. “It only takes a couple of minutes to read a short article and we envision the Newswire will become a starting point that welcomes people to discover all that Mongabay has to offer.”

The people behind Mongabay’s Newswire

Currently, three of Mongabay’s five bureaus publish short news articles regularly. Mongabay’s Global English bureau was the first to adopt the format, in July 2024, coinciding with the launch of Mongabay’s new website design. Behind the desk is a globally distributed team of eight editors, reporters and program directors from across Mongabay’s newsroom who keep stories moving each day. Leading the Global English bureau’s output from opposite sides of the globe are Newswire editors Bobby Bascomb, based in Costa Rica, and Shreya Dasgupta, based in India.

“Editing the Newswire is incredibly rewarding work. It allows me to highlight the most important environmental stories of our time and share them with readers around the world,” Bascomb says. “It’s a quick and reliable way to catch up on some of the most important — and often under-the-radar — environmental stories of our time.”

The Newswire serves as a bridge to Mongabay’s classic in-depth investigations, providing readers with a credible snapshot without compromising substance. “Mongabay is known for its excellent long-form and investigative reporting, but some readers may be stretched for time and wish to consume short news that’s also well-reported and researched and delivered in a timely manner,” Dasgupta says. “The Newswire fills that gap.”

For both editors, the demands of this brand of environmental journalism are personally meaningful. “The global environmental challenges we face can feel overwhelming at times, but working on the Newswire feels like a proactive way to be part of the solution,” Bascomb says. “I hope our readers also feel empowered to work toward positive outcomes in their communities.”

“I’ve previously been a staff writer at Mongabay, and have learnt a lot about environmental reporting from the editors here,” Dasgupta says. “Now, as a Newswire editor myself, I’ve enjoyed applying those skills and standards to shape Mongabay’s shortform news.”

Reaching new, broader audiences

Beyond producing timely updates, the Newswire helps Mongabay connect with broader and more diverse audiences. Its short, accessible format introduces readers to investigations while enabling partnerships that expand coverage and syndication across multiple languages, particularly for regions such as Africa with high linguistic diversity.

To reach these audiences, the desk responds quickly to emerging developments, condenses long-form reports into concise updates, and adapts stories for mobile and social media use. This model also opens future capacity to deliver environmental journalism in regional languages and to communities in environmentally vulnerable regions.

“A Newswire story is always under 500 words, so we ensure that each short focuses on one or two well-researched and reported key points,” Dasgupta says. “This allows our readers to quickly grasp the essentials amid their busy day and later return for Mongabay’s more in-depth coverage on the same subject.”

Impact

How tapir toilets become buffets & boost global awareness of forest biodiversity via Mongabay

The Newswire Desk immediately began driving impact. A July 2024 report about lowland tapir latrines in Brazil revealed an underappreciated ecological asset and sparked widespread attention in the media and from Hollywood.

Dasgupta’s article, based on new research led by Laís Lautenschlager from the University of Miami, revealed that communal latrines created by lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) in Brazil’s Carlos Botelho State Park are not only defecation sites, but key ecological hubs. The study reaffirmed that tapirs support forest regeneration by dispersing seeds, but it went further by showing how their latrines also help feed other species, including Brazilian squirrels and several rainforest bird species, demonstrating an often-overlooked aspect of species interdependence in tropical forests.

Following Mongabay’s publication, the story quickly gained unexpected traction. Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist at the Yale School of the Environment and author of a related study in the journal Biotropica, said the story drove “unprecedented attention” to the study, including a share on Instagram from actor and environmental advocate Leonardo DiCaprio. In addition, The Economist reached out to the researchers, citing Mongabay’s reporting.

Brando estimated that the story reached millions of people, a scale of visibility rarely achieved for such niche ecological research. “Mongabay’s article had a significant impact on my research in terms of advertising,” Lautenschlager said. “It definitely raised the interest of people inside and outside academia.” Colleagues, researchers, and even a zookeeper from the Paris Zoo reached out to discuss tapir behavior, and how communal latrines may be tied to social or reproductive functions.

Reporting spurs effort to return key tree to nature in Mauritius

A 2024 Mongabay article by wire reporter Shanna Hanbury revealed that the last wild Round Island hurricane palm (Dictyosperma album var. conjugatum), a rare species native to Mauritius, had snapped during a windstorm, marking its extinction. Once thriving on the Indian Ocean’s Round Island, a hotspot for rare species, the tree had stood alone for decades as the only survivor of its kind.

“The tree was like the Eiffel Tower of Round Island. Anybody working on plants, reptiles, seabirds, or invertebrates would say, ‘We’ve got to go see it,’” said Vikash Tatayah, conservation director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. The NGO has been working to save the palm and other species for decades in partnership with the Mauritian government and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. Years of decline ultimately took their toll, but it may not be the end.

After reading Mongabay’s report, Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (RJBG) discovered it held a living specimen of the same variant. After confirming the tree produced flowers and fruits, the botanical garden shared its findings publicly.

“We discovered we’ve had the hurricane palm in our collection for over 70 years, which means there’s a reasonable chance that ours come from other parent plants, older than the ones they may have there today,” said RJBG’s press officer, Claudia Rabelo Lopes. “We also found through the BGCI that this variety is being cultivated in other botanical gardens around the world,” she said.

After gathering more information about their specimens and compiling data, staff from the botanical garden told Mongabay in October 2025 that they were contacting the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation with the intention to help return the Round Island hurricane palm variant to the wild. These actions, directly prompted by Mongabay’s independent reporting, opened a new path for international cooperation to restore a tree once thought lost.

Following up to track impact

The Newswire Desk also follows up on prior reporting to document impact. For example, this short calls attention to a recommendation by Brazilian authorities to suspend all ongoing and future REDD+ and carbon credit projects on Indigenous and traditional territories in the state of Amazonas. The recommendation follows a special investigation published by Mongabay highlighting the potential problem of timber laundering associated with REDD+ projects. As the Newswire Desk evolves, Mongabay aims to do more follow-up coverage similar to this. It’s just one way to sustain public oversight supportive of transparency and accountability of the issues we’re reporting on, while also tracking journalism’s impact.

“With this information we can prioritise management and conservation practices to maximise forest regrowth,” Kelly Anderson, a research scientist at Missouri Botanical Garden in the U.S., told Mongabay by email. Anderson wasn’t involved with the study but does work with NEXTropics, a network of scientists who collaborate on forest nutrient studies.

During the recent study, researchers “wanted to test how either nitrogen or phosphorus limit forest recovery and specifically if there was a shift in that limitation from really young forests to older forests,” Sarah Batterman, corresponding author of the study with the Cary Institute and the University of Leeds, told Mongabay in a video call.

To test both nutrients the research team conducted a long-term field experiment in Panama. Research plots were established in 2015 and 2016 in recovering forests of three different ages: those on recently abandoned pasture; young secondary forest (10 years); and older secondary forests (30 years). They also looked at mature forest plots established in 1997, for a total of 76 experimental plots.

For each age of forest, plots received one of four treatments: added nitrogen, added phosphorus, both nutrients, and control plots where nothing was added. They also established several replicate plots where they repeated the experiments.

Batterman said the strongest response was in young trees that received additional nitrogen.

“So, in the first 10 years of forest recovery, the forests grow back about twice as fast when they have sufficient nitrogen in the soil compared to when they don’t,” Batterman told Mongabay. “That’s really fast recovery.”

The nitrogen-boosted growth declined sharply in the middle-aged trees and was undetectable in mature forests.

“We were really surprised because the strength of nitrogen limitation was so high. We were kind of blown away by that,” Batterman said.

While additional nitrogen can significantly help young tropical trees grow and sequester carbon, the researchers caution that the source of nitrogen is important. Excess synthetic fertilizer can leach into waterways, creating pollution or forming nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Instead, the researchers suggest incorporating native nitrogen-fixing trees into reforestation projects. Another option is targeting reforestation efforts in areas with excess nitrogen from industry, cattle ranching and vehicles.

“Then it’s kind of a win-win because the forest will suck up that extra nitrogen, as opposed to [polluting] waterways, or it’s lost as gaseous emissions, including of nitrous oxide,” Batterman said.

“The next steps will be to replicate this type of experiment across more tropical forests,” Anderson said.

If the same results hold up globally, nitrogen-supported forest regrowth could have a significant climate impact; approximately 0.69 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide could be sequestered each year, the researchers found. That’s roughly the annual emissions of Indonesia.

“It’s not going to solve climate change but it’s a piece in the puzzle,” Batterman said.

Myanmar is a country of extremes. From tropical forests, mangroves and wetlands to frost-bitten alpine mountain slopes and jagged limestone karst outcrops, it’s home to tremendous botanical diversity. Orchids alone account for more than 1,200 species, and researchers have described scores of new-to-science plant species in recent years, including a color-shifting Begonia and a rare type of ginger that flourishes in lofty cloud forests.

Yet there remain glaring gaps in what’s known about Myanmar’s floristic diversity. “Myanmar hosts exceptionally high plant diversity and endemism,” Ke-Ping Ma, a biologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Mongabay. “However, there has been a long-standing lack [of] plant distribution data, due in part to limited field surveys and incomplete digitization of herbarium records.”

Political instability inflamed by the 2021 military coup also severely hampers biological research. Some of the most unstable parts of Myanmar are also the most biologically rich. Once protected by their remoteness, these areas are increasingly threatened by rampant natural resource extraction as vying political groups seek to fund their operations.

“Biodiversity is often one of the neglected victims of war because you can’t go and collect data, and you also can’t protect areas,” said Alice Hughes, a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “We have very little data even on basic things like [patterns of] habitat destruction. Whilst we can get some of that information from satellites, obviously, anything requiring on-the-ground information is very, very challenging.”

The lack of knowledge about plants risks species slipping into oblivion before they’ve even been documented, Hughes said. This includes species that occur nowhere else on the planet — Myanmar is home to 864 endemic plant species. It also hampers efforts to create strategies to stem the loss of biodiversity in a country where resources for conservation are notoriously thin on the ground.

In a new study, Hughes and Ma aim to close these key gaps. Together with their colleagues from China and Myanmar, they modeled the distribution of plant species that had been recorded five or more times in the country, amounting to roughly 8,100 species of plants — a figure they note likely represents only a fraction of Myanmar’s total flora.

The study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, provides an updated baseline of botanical diversity across Myanmar, covering flowering and non-flowering plants, ferns, mosses and liverworts. It also pinpoints the areas where conservation efforts for plants are most urgently needed.

Mountains and tropical lowlands

Mountainous landscapes in Kachin state in the north of Myanmar were identified as floristically rich and important refugia for endemic species. These areas included the snowcapped Hkakaborazi National Park, Emawbum National Park, and the Nujiang Langcang Gorge Alpine Conifer and Mixed Forests ecoregion. The team also singled out botanical hotspots in Chin Hills in Chin state, Dawna Hills in Karen state, and tropical lowland evergreen and semi-evergreen forests in the Tanintharyi region in the south.

Many potentially botanically rich areas had to be left out of the analysis due to fragmented or completely missing survey data, the study notes, including crucial habitats for not just plants but also countless threatened animals. These areas host wetlands, savannas and limestone karsts, which “should be being protected,” Hughes said.

Rugged mountain chains were prominent priority areas for plants in the analyses due to the high incidence of cool-adapted and range-restricted species there, Ma said. Protecting these areas and ensuring their connectivity across landscapes will be vital in the face of climate shifts, he noted. “Higher elevation mountain regions and forested corridor networks that provide safe, stable conditions and allow gene flow [can] help ensure the long-term resilience of plant communities.”

Kate Armstrong, an assistant curator at the New York Botanical Garden, who wasn’t involved with the study, said the new botanical mapping is a valuable step, even though incomplete plant records in Myanmar limit the level of detail possible for now.

Armstrong, who conducted botanical research in the country’s north between 2014 and 2019, said that while climate change is definitely a concern for plants, the most imminent threat is land-use change. This includes the construction of roads into supposedly protected areas, such as Hkakaborazi National Park, she said, as well as mining for amber, jade and gold. “Some of the gold and amber mines are run by local villagers just trying to scrape by, whereas other mines (probably the majority) are government enterprises with Chinese companies,” she said.

Multiple investigations also show that in the rush for mineral revenues, clandestine rare earth mining is also taking a toll in remote and biodiverse border areas of Kachin and Shan states. Meanwhile, deforestation remains rife across many of the most floristically diverse areas identified in the new study. Global Forest Watch data indicate that between 2002 and 2024, Myanmar lost 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of humid primary forest, representing a 6% reduction in old-growth rainforest cover.

Boost research capacity and protections

The researchers say that while it’s unlikely proactive conservation measures will be put in place while the political situation remains unstable, they recommend expanding the coverage of protected areas over the longer term. The team found that only about 16% of the areas identified in the study as priority areas for endemic plant species lie within protected land.

To boost protected area coverage, the researchers recommend a combined approach that incorporates locally led and Indigenous initiatives. Many of the floristically diverse areas identified in the study overlap with territories stewarded by Myanmar’s 135 ethnic groups, who manage 30-40% of the country’s land mass, the study notes.

The researchers point to Kaydoh Mae Nyaw Wildlife Sanctuary, an area managed by Indigenous customary practices in Karen state, as an example of successful area-based biodiversity protection that goes beyond the junta’s prevailing state-controlled approach that, without appropriate management or resources, risks protected areas becoming little more than “paper parks.”

“Even if we were to draw a protected area on a map, if [policymakers] don’t allocate resources to make them real, then you’re still probably going to see tree felling and the harvesting of plants and animals,” Hughes told Mongabay.

Protected areas currently cover 6.4% of land in Myanmar, according to the study. The authors recommend the junta formally recognize forest reserves co-managed by Indigenous communities and incorporate “other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECMs) into conservation strategies. Such an approach could achieve multiple aims, they say, including peace-building, climate resilience and biodiversity preservation.

However, given biological research expertise took a hit in the aftermath of the 2021 coup as environmental specialists exited the country amid public clampdowns, Hughes said Myanmar’s institutional capacity to make decisions based on scientific evidence is lacking.

“The multiple challenges in Myanmar highlight the need for further collaborative research to just help us move things forward together,” she said, adding that boosting taxonomic research expertise within Myanmar, particularly among young researchers, as well as consistent funding of conservation initiatives will also be crucial to preserving what remains of Myanmar’s biodiversity in the near-future.

Ma said that if further protections and sincere action to improve the outlook for Myanmar’s floristically diverse habitats aren’t forthcoming, there’s more at stake than species losses.

“Once lost, these species and the evolutionary history they represent cannot be recovered,” he said. “The decline of plant diversity would have broader effects on ecosystem stability, water regulation, pollination systems, and the livelihoods of communities who depend on natural resources.”

Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences kept busy throughout 2025. Along with collaborators from across the globe, they described 72 new-to-science species from six continents — creatures living in unexplored ocean depths, in plain sight on the Galápagos Islands, and in a U.S. national park.

The species include a bird, two worms, two lizards, one cicada, seven plants, six geckos, 15 beetles, five mollusks, 12 bush crickets, seven fishes, two wasps, 11 sea slugs, and a skink.

One species, the cardinalfish Epigonus zonatus, was found on an ocean expedition joined by Fidel Castro in 1997. The specimen sat in the CAS’s collection for nearly 30 years before scientists formally described it this year.

The California Academy of Sciences is a San Francisco-based research institution with more than 100 scientists and 46 million specimens. As technology improves and scientists learn more about life on Earth, these preserved specimens are leading to new findings.

Some researchers estimate that less than 20% of all the species on the planet have been described, and many will face extinction before they’re named by science.

“Discoveries like these remind us that much of life on Earth remains undocumented and therefore unprotected,” CAS virologist and chief of science Shannon Bennett said in a statement. “Each newly described species adds a crucial piece to the puzzle of understanding.”

The full list of 2025 discoveries includes five bivalves and a gastropod from Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County, California; two wasp species representing new genera from Australia; a cicada from California documented by iNaturalist; and a katydid.

Botanists described six flowering plants, including specimens from Madagascar, Panama, and three from unprotected Campo Rupestre habitats in Brazil, along with a new moss species from India.

Marine discoveries included the Galápagos lava heron, a perchlet from the Maldives, a soapfish from the eastern Atlantic, and 11 sea slug species.

Researchers also described 10 beetle species from Central and South America, including specimens from Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama, with one representing a new genus.

From Africa, scientists described a lizard from Zambia’s Zambezi River Basin, a Namib Day Gecko and skink from Angola, along with six gecko species from Angola and Namibia, including three endangered species.

Additional discoveries included two groundwater worms from Spain and four goby species, one of which was named after Darth Vader.

Here are some of the new species described in 2025 by California Academy of Sciences:

A new sunflower genus in Texas

In 2024, park volunteer Deb Manley saw a fuzzy little flower in Big Bend National Park, Texas, and uploaded a photo to the community-science app iNaturalist. The woolly devil (Ovicula biradiata), as it turns out, was an unknown species and a new genus in the sunflower family.

CAS botany curator Isaac Lichter Marck described the new plant, marking the first time in almost 50 years that both a new genus and species of plant have been described from a U.S. national park.

“While many assume that the plants and animals within our country’s national parks have already been documented, scientists still make surprising new discoveries in these iconic protected landscapes,” Lichter Marck said.

The name Ovicula means “tiny sheep,” referring to the white hairs covering its leaves and honoring Big Bend’s iconic bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis).

Botanists call this a “belly plant” because you have to lie on the ground to see it properly. The small wildflower has fuzzy white leaves and dark maroon petals. It only blooms after rainfall.

A heron in plain sight

Scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about a “common” bird from the Galápagos Islands. The Galápagos lava heron (Butorides sundevalli), which people see all the time around the islands, is actually its own species, not just a type of South American heron like experts previously thought.

“By combining field observations with genetic analysis, we were able to finally unravel the mystery of a bird familiar to locals, tourists and field guides,” said lead researcher Ezra Mendales. “It’s a reminder that even common birds in iconic, well-studied places like the Galápagos can still hold surprises for science.”

The heron has dark gray feathers that blend in with the black volcanic rocks along the coast, and a bigger, stronger beak than its relatives.

“Much like the striated heron, this species has dark, slate-gray plumage, which helps it camouflage against the volcanic rock of the Galápagos coastline,” Mendales said. Although color differences between populations have made the species difficult to classify, these variations reveal ongoing evolutionary changes tailored to specific habitats.

A colorful fish in the Maldives

Luiz Rocha discovered a colorful new fish species while diving 122 meters (400 feet) deep in the Maldives. It was the fish’s colorful pattern that tipped him off. Unlike other fish in the perchlet family that have bold vertical stripes, this one had light red spots instead. This unique pattern made it stand out, even in the dim light of the deep reef.

The fish, Plectranthias raki, was named after a local word in the Dhivehi language. “Raki” means “feeling shy to confront people,” which Rocha said describes how this timid fish behaves.

Rocha, who serves as the ichthyology curator at CAS, regularly explores these deep reefs, called the twilight zone. While discovering new species, he also notices serious pollution problems.

“We see all kinds of plastic pollution at these depths — discarded fishing lines, anchor ropes, and other human-produced trash — underscoring the need to protect these deep-reef ecosystems and the unknown biodiversity they harbor,” he said.

A slew of sea slugs

Terry Gosliner has described about one-quarter of all sea slug species known to science. This year, he added 11 more species to that list.

As the invertebrate zoology curator at CAS, his discoveries include a shimmering opalescent sea slug from the Indo-Pacific (Cyerce basi) and two species found only in California: Doto urak and D. kwakwak. The names come from Indigenous languages. Urak means “salmon” in Ohlone, describing the slug’s light pink color, while kwakwak means “yellow” in Kumeyaay.

Gosliner recently returned from an expedition to Guam, where deep sea “hotels” revealed 20 new-to-science species, including sea slugs. He’s now working to formally describe these unknown sea slugs found in Guam’s twilight zone reefs.

“The twilight zone hosts an astonishing array of marine species, yet we’ve only just begun to understand the communities that live at these depths,” Gosliner said. “We still lack basic information about which species are present, how they interact with one another, and the key ecological roles they play. Each expedition and dive helps us piece together a little more of the big picture, and builds the foundational knowledge that is essential to developing effective conservation strategies for these hard-to-reach ecosystems.”

A deep-sea fish found with Fidel Castro on board

Academy scientists John McCosker and Douglas Long described a new deep-water cardinalfish, Epigonus zonatus, found almost 610 m (2,000 ft) below the ocean’s surface. The fish specimen came from a 1997 deep-sea expedition to Cuba that included an unexpected visitor: Fidel Castro, the Cuban president at the time.

McCosker wrote about the experience in a 1999 issue of California Wild, a magazine that CAS had published from 1946-2006. In it, he described how soldiers arrived at their research vessel one evening, followed by Castro. McCosker noted that despite being trained as a lawyer, Castro had spent much of his youth diving and fishing in Cuban waters.

The cardinalfish specimen they collected during that expedition sat in the CAS collection for nearly 30 years before scientists formally described it this year. This shows how museum collections preserve unknown species that researchers may not be ready to study right away. As technology improves and scientists learn more about ocean life, these preserved specimens can lead to new findings.

The Van Eck Forest in northwestern California is home to iconic coast redwood trees, which store more above-ground carbon per acre than any other forest type. The oldest trees can grow to heights of more than 90 meters (300 feet) and may be more than 2,000 years old. But due to the region’s extensive logging, which reduced old-growth redwood forests to just 5% of their original extent, very few large, old redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) exist today.

Consequently, there are also fewer fern mats high up in the forest canopy: large masses of leather-leaf ferns (Polypodium scouleri), a keystone species that stores water, mitigates forest temperatures and provides habitat for other plants and animals.

To help restore these historic forests, a conservation nonprofit and a university are experimenting with ways to transplant the mats back into redwood treetops. In a collaboration that began in 2021, the Pacific Forest Trust and scientists from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, are taking fern mats that have fallen from old-growth trees and replanting them in younger trees to restore the canopy layer.

As they grow over decades and centuries, these mats collect decomposing plant matter and germinate seeds, creating swaths of arboreal gardens that are home to salamanders, insects, birds and rare lichens.

“It’s like having a little garden up there,” said Laurie Wayburn, co-founder and president of the Pacific Forest Trust.

‘Putting back the pieces’

In nature, fern mats form when old-growth trees shed their oldest leaves from the highest branches, creating leaf litter on the tree limbs below. Over time, as leaves and other organic matter decompose, soil builds up and retains water, creating moist pockets where fern spores germinate.

Over many years, they grow into dense mats, some as large as cars, said Marie Antoine, a botanist and research associate in forestry at Cal Poly Humboldt who worked on the project. By then, other plants such as western hemlock and huckleberry shrubs grow up to a few feet tall to form these aerial gardens, providing berries and habitat for birds and other animals.

Pacific Forest Trust and Cal Poly Humboldt launched a pilot project to selectively plant fern mats in the tops of tall redwoods on the California side of Van Eck Forest, a 3,800-hectare (9,400-acre), privately owned timberland that straddles California and Oregon. It’s managed and conserved by the Pacific Forest Trust, under conservation easements, with a mandate to protect and restore the remaining old-growth forest while sustainably harvesting timber.

In the four years since the project began, researchers have learned more about which trees are best to prioritize, and how they might be able to scale up across a larger area.

“We have been managing this forest … to put back all the pieces that belong in an old-growth forest while recognizing that this is a managed and young forest,” Wayburn said. Managed forests allow logging for timber while prioritizing old-growth qualities, such as reestablishing mid-canopy and shrub layers, protecting other native trees and retaining dead trees that characterize natural forests, she said.

These fern mats do a lot of work for the overall ecosystem, making them an important component of restoration, Wayburn said. Not only do fern mats shade the forest floor, keeping temperatures cool and foster surrounding biodiversity, they’re also crucial to the forest’s hydrology.

Fern mats store huge amounts of water — roughly 5,000 gallons per acre, or nearly 47,000 liters per hectare — that are released in the hottest months, keeping the rest of the forest hydrated, which is crucial during drought. Redwoods’ aerial roots can also plug into those mats as a water source, Wayburn said.

“That’s a really critical function as our climate [becomes] warmer for longer,” she said. The climate is also increasingly drier, she added, resulting in roughly a third less fog since the early 1900s. That’s problematic because fog provides more than 30% of the precipitation in redwood forests.

Part of that strategy requires preserving, in perpetuity, what the Pacific Forest Trust deems “potentially elite trees,” or PETs for short — those that grow the fastest. Redwoods live for thousands of years, and these older specimens store more carbon, provide more habitat and hold larger fern mats. However, because of widespread logging, ancient trees are increasingly rare.

“We know the importance of these older trees, but there’s not really a provision for having trees like this in the future unless we do something different on the broader landscape,” Antoine said.

So, the science team selected the next-best trees available in Van Eck, many of which are younger than 150 years old, just babies by comparison, Antoine said, but they are robust trees with enough structure to hold the mats in their branches.

With permits to collect fern mats that blew down from the canopies during storms, the team tied bread-loaf-sized mats onto supportive branches using biodegradable hemp cord. Over the years, a few of them have blown back down, but those that haven’t budged are located in structurally mature trees, Antoine said. So far, she and her colleagues have planted 60 fern mats in 15 of the so-called elite trees. The team plans to check on the existing fern mats in the new year.

Mini-ecosystems in the treetops

In addition to hosting fern mats, large, old trees have other benefits too.

Their textured bark and notches of rotting wood provide habitat for plants, insects, bats and even methane-eating bacteria. The larger the tree, the greater the surface area for bacteria to live, and the more methane they consume. Methane’s warming potential is about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timescale, which is why the bacteria are so important.

Old redwood trees also have extensive underground mycorrhizal networks — branching fungal threads that grow between root systems and share energy and signals between trees. The oldest ones are the wisest, Wayburn said: “One big old tree is kind of like the matriarchal elephant.”

These skyward ecosystems support a slew of forest life, from spiders and crickets to oribatid mites and salamanders. Chickadees (genus Poecile), common ravens (Corvus corax), ruby-crowned kinglets (Corthylio calendula), Steller’s jays (Cyanocitta stelleri) and other bird species frequent the canopies, too, Antoine said.

“A lot of the biodiversity in our coast redwood forest is in the canopy,” said Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration at Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and protecting land for coast redwood and giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) forests. “But in order to harbor that biodiversity, you need to have big trees with big branches.”

The endangered marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus), for instance, is a seabird that nests in old-growth coast redwood trees, using large, mossy branches to lay its eggs. But there are fewer trees to nest in. “As we’ve lost these complex forests, their numbers have declined,” Blom said.

Importantly, dense tree canopies also provide the necessary shade to cool rivers and streams for spawning salmon, Blom added. When the trees fall over and die, they’re important for salmon, creating eddies and pools that provide habitat for different life stages. In turn, when the salmon die, they fertilize the soil and sediments with nitrogen — a crucial element for forest growth. Salmon numbers have likewise declined with old-growth forest logging.

Wandering salamanders (Aneides vagrans), meanwhile, have evolved to live their entire lives in the redwoods’ arboreal canopy.

Looking up at the future

Now that scientists know it’s possible to manually transplant fern mats, they’re hoping to scale up the project to older, larger trees that can hold them in place for long periods of time.

For instance, Save the Redwoods League is restoring large tracts of forest that have been leveled by loggers. “I could see [this fern mat] canopy work eventually being a component of the project as well,” Blom told Mongabay. Working with tribal leaders to develop healthy forest management in tandem with cultural practices is essential, he added, such as using controlled burns in areas where decades of fire suppression have turned fire into a destructive threat.

Another ideal location is Arcata Community Forest, Antoine said, a secondary forest with trees that are a few decades older than those in Van Eck. If  managers can designate a few “elite” trees for protection there, “those would be the trees where we could plant ferns and let those be these islands of biodiversity, even in a managed forest landscape,” Antoine said. “It doesn’t have to be every tree in the forest.”

There’s a delicate balance between market pressures and fostering the redwood forests of the future, Wayburn said. But by prioritizing pockets where some trees can live out their thousand-year-old lives, restoring ecosystem function and biodiversity is possible.

“A forest is a system,” she added, “not just a commodity.”

Smallholders produce significant quantities of Vietnam’s coffee, Indonesia’s palm oil, and Thailand’s rubber exported into the EU. Yet under the bloc’s upcoming deforestation-free regulation (EUDR), industry experts say small-scale producers across Southeast Asia need more support to help prepare them to comply with the new rules.

The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is set to take effect at the end of 2026, after EU lawmakers voted earlier this month to postpone its implementation for the second year in a row, citing technical concerns.

Its goal is to ensure that forest-linked products imported into the EU are deforestation-free by introducing mechanisms that enable companies trading seven commodities — cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy and timber — to track their products’ origins throughout the entire supply chain.

While experts say increased oversight is a vital step to reduce the footprint of EU consumption on forests, others have warned that without appropriate support and governance mechanisms, the new rules could introduce inequities that harm small-scale producers.

Many smallholders lack the capacity and capital to comply with some aspects of the new regulations, for instance. This could see them sidelined in favor of bigger producers who can more easily adapt, according to Martin Greijmans, community enterprise program lead at RECOFTC, a Thailand-based community forest nonprofit.

Further complicating matters are limited resources to inform smallholders about how the regulations will affect their businesses, underscoring the need for greater efforts by governments and private companies to help smallholders adapt, he says.

“One shocking thing that I still come across is that many smallholders and small-scale companies still lack understanding of the EUDR’s mandatory nature,” Greijmans tells Mongabay. “They often mistake it for a voluntary certification.”

In an interview with Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan, Martin Greijmans talks about the challenges facing smallholders in Southeast Asia as they prepare for the EUDR, the existing initiatives available to support them, and the need to “future-proof” small-scale producers as global sustainability requirements continue to evolve. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: What are the current major gaps and challenges that smallholders in Southeast Asia face in complying with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)?

Martin Greijmans: There’s a lot of variability between countries, commodities and landscapes. In many instances, smallholders have demonstrated strong capacity to overcome some of the challenges of complying with the new regulations. But many smallholders, especially in remote areas or marginalized groups, lack clear land tenure or legal documentation. This makes it difficult for them to demonstrate legal production — an essential EUDR requirement — and could mean private sector traders might not be interested in buying from them because of these complications.

Smallholders often also struggle to collect the necessary geolocation data and digital documentation to comply with EUDR traceability requirements. Although some mapping efforts are underway, many smallholders still lack mapped land plots. For compliance with the EUDR, however, traders require this data. Therefore, they might send their staff to collect it using tools that are inaccessible to smallholders and their communities. This raises important questions about who owns the digital data collected, as it is not always shared equitably with farmers. It also remains unclear whether communities understand the data being generated and how they can benefit from it. Privacy concerns further complicate matters: who can access the data and how it is used.

This is why smallholders need support to help them participate in the data collection process. Some groups, like AGRIAC [a small-scale rubber support organization based in Thailand] are training smallholders on geolocation data requirements so they can understand where the data comes from, how to collect it, and how to manage it. But when it comes to private companies who are primarily focused on securing supply, they may not invest so much in empowering smallholders unless they have a specific social agenda.

Mongabay: Secure land tenure seems to be critical for smallholders to demonstrate legal production under the EUDR and also to access finance. Do you see certain groups of smallholders being especially at risk of losing out once the rules take effect?

Martin Greijmans: Ethnic minorities in remote, mountainous areas and those with unclear land tenure are the most at risk of being excluded. This includes widowed women in some countries. For example, in Laos, land legal documents typically only list male names.

There’s a risk that traders who want to secure their supply chain might start to avoid smallholders in circumstances where legality cannot be verified from land titles. From the company’s perspective, it might be too expensive to engage with them, risking being cut off from EU markets despite being responsible producers.

This could push already vulnerable smallholders toward non-EU markets with fewer regulations and lower environmental standards, or toward growing less sustainable crops like corn. Currently, there are no specific legal safeguards in place to protect these vulnerable groups against risks like land dispossession that might arise if they’re shut out of big markets, such as the EU.

Mongabay: What kind of support do smallholders need to help overcome these risks and support their capacity to meet the new requirements?

Martin Greijmans: Accelerating the legal registration of land for marginalized groups is crucial but costs money. Although progress is being made, such as in Indonesia through social forestry reforms, lack of funding often limits what can be achieved in many locations. It’s an expensive undertaking and might not reach remote communities quickly enough.

New technologies like drones could help. Drones are a very quick way of surveying plots of land and demonstrating to what extent boundaries overlap with forest areas. However, their official acceptance for legal documentation is uncertain, and flying a drone in countries like Vietnam is not simple.

Mobile apps can be helpful too. We have a project in Lam Dong province in Vietnam, part of the Reversing Environmental Degradation in Africa and Asia (REDAA) program, to help smallholder coffee farmers collect and manage their own data with a view to developing biodiversity-rich agroforestry models. They’re using an open-source mobile phone app called Epicollect, and also traditional paper logbooks, to monitor a simple framework of 10 indicators, such as water quality and soil biodiversity, on a quarterly basis. This gives them a record of their sustainability progress. This goes beyond the requirements of the EUDR specifically, but it can help to build trust between smallholders and the companies they supply, especially if they can demonstrate sustainability improvements. In the longer term, we aim for this to extend to agroforestry systems beyond just coffee.

Mongabay: How are Southeast Asian governments preparing for the EUDR? Are national policies or land-use data systems being strengthened to help smallholders comply?

Martin Greijmans: Governments in the region are preparing, but with varying approaches. Indonesia and Malaysia, big oil palm producers, initially expressed strong complaints about the EUDR. But national land-registration systems are slowly coming together, although they remain incomplete and might not reach more remote and marginalized areas where legality of land ownership is less straightforward.

Vietnam took quite a positive outlook to the EUDR, focusing on the coffee sector as they’re the second-largest coffee exporter in the world, and the EU is a significant market. They’re looking at it as an opportunity to have a competitive advantage in the coffee sector as a nation. Over the years, there have of course been issues in the coffee sector in Vietnam: a lot of forest degradation in the central highlands where robusta coffee is grown. Robusta doesn’t need tree cover like arabica. However, the government has been introducing new mechanisms, such as the Strategy for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development 2021-2030 (Vietnam), as well as encouraging international voluntary sustainability certifications (e.g., Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade, 4C), demonstrating some progress toward sustainability, even before the EUDR came into view.

Vietnam has specific challenges because farmers don’t have the security of owning land. On paper, all land in Vietnam officially belongs to the state, with farmers holding temporary land-use certificates for 30 to 50 years. However, Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development got support from the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) to develop a national database system for mapping forest and coffee-growing areas to support the traceability requirements of the EUDR. It hasn’t been completed yet, but the low-hanging fruit of the larger, legally straightforward plots have been documented.

Ultimately, support for meeting the compliance requirements varies from country to country based on whether the government views the commodities as an important economic incentive. The rubber sector is quite mature in Thailand, as are the palm oil sectors in Indonesia and Malaysia. But if you go to Laos, for instance, government rubber sector support is missing, so companies (which are mainly Chinese companies there) have more influence.

Mongabay: Beyond national-level efforts, what other types of initiatives or programs are helping smallholders prepare for the EUDR in Southeast Asia?

Martin Greijmans: Well, there’s been very little funding from the EU to do anything. GIZ [Germany’s Agency for International Cooperation] had an EUDR engagement project in five countries in Southeast Asia that had an element of focus on training smallholders to raise awareness of the EUDR, but that’s wrapping up at the end of 2025. It would be good to be able to scale up that work, to institutionalize these types of trainings into agencies like, say, the Rubber Authority of Thailand or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

One shocking thing that I still come across is that many smallholders and small-scale companies still lack understanding of the EUDR’s mandatory nature. They often mistake it for a voluntary certification like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification. But with so little funding around to get the word out, a lot of the outreach ends up being driven by the larger companies that buy from them or through the few outreach projects that are able to operate.

Mongabay: From the evidence you’ve seen in the field, are you hopeful that enough can be achieved to support smallholders as the compliance deadline approaches?

Martin Greijmans: Quite a few organizations are working hard to prepare smallholders for compliance through outreach and information sharing. AGRIAC in Thailand, for example, has reached out to RECOFTC to learn how to deliver more effective trainings. I think these types of organizations deserve far more support.

I also see signs that NGOs to trying to play a slightly different role in value chains than previously. It’s perhaps partly driven by funding cuts, but also they’re increasingly understanding companies’ requirements and building partnerships within value chains, rather than solely supporting farmers in isolation. Supply chains can be complex, with many intermediaries, so showcasing the capacity of smallholders to meet sustainability goals that go beyond even the EUDR requirements (as we’re trying to do with the data collection apps in Vietnam), underscores to companies why it makes sense to work with them.

Building trust within the value chain, between the farmers, farmer organizations and the private sector, is where I see NGOs having the most meaningful role right now. This ensures sustainable change beyond single project life cycles and timescales, and future-proofs smallholders. The EUDR will not be the last legislative change these sectors have to keep up with, so having those strong relationships there and building capacity means smallholders are more resilient and less likely to be left behind.

Rewilding was a young idea when Quétier began working on it, more theory than practice. In the 1990s, it sounded utopian: let nature repair itself by restoring the species that once shaped it. But in the past decade, the notion took on urgency. Forests were collapsing under heat, rivers ran dry in late summer, and even here, in this quiet corner of the western Alps, droughts and fires arrived with unsettling regularity.

A “fixed approach to nature doesn’t really work anymore,” Quétier tells Starling. Rewilding, he believes, offers something sturdier than nostalgia.

Quétier admires the region’s stubbornness. Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and marmots (Marmota marmota) crept back in the mid-20th century, drawing in wolves (Canis lupus) and Eurasian beavers (Castor fiber) that crossed from Italy. Friends who share Quétier’s faith nominated the area as France’s first rewilding site in 2019.

It wasn’t starting from nothing, says Olivier Raynaud, director of the subgroup Rewilding France and Quétier’s colleague. The land had been quietly healing itself for decades, he adds.

Still, Quétier and Raynaud know the work requires more than biology. It means earning the trust of landowners, persuading farmers wary of wolves, explaining to skeptical villagers why vultures matter. It means accepting that some species like Eurasian brown bears (Ursus arctos arctos) cannot yet return.

Quétier understands the fragility of the enterprise. Climate projections point to hotter, harsher decades ahead. Forests might falter. Rivers might shrink. Yet he insists the only real gamble is doing nothing.

“People are looking for new ideas,” he says. Rewilding, in his mind, is not a cure. It is simply a way of giving life a fighting chance.

The two potential sites are Thyspunt, on the Eastern Cape coast, and Bantamsklip, near Dyer Island in the Western Cape, home to a significant, but declining colony of critically endangered African penguins (Spheniscus demersus).

“Bantamsklip is a globally unique coastal environment with extremely high ecological value, and the risks from infrastructure of this scale remain unacceptable,” Wilfred Chivell, founder of the nonprofit Dyer Island Conservation Trust, told Mongabay by email.

South Africa’s first nuclear power plant, the 1,860-megawatt Koeberg facility, has been running since 1984 and supplies roughly 4% of the country’s electricity.

Discussions for a second nuclear plant began in the mid-2000s, identifying Thyspunt, Bantamsklip and Duynefontein, near Koeberg, as potential locations. After years of legal challenges over coastal ecology, seismic risks, and heritage impacts concerns, in August 2025 Duynefontein was upheld as the site for the 4,000-MW second plant.

Eskom has now initiated an environment impact assessment for its third nuclear facility, with a capacity of 5,200 MW.

An Eskom spokesperson told Mongabay by email that the EIA is for Thyspunt, with Bantamsklip being evaluated as an alternative site, “in line with EIA regulations that require consideration of alternatives.”

“This will be a new EIA application and lessons learnt from the previous application will be taken into account by the specialists,” they said.

South African news agency GroundUp reported that during the project’s virtual public meetings in early December, attendees questioned the lack of public participation ahead of choosing Bantamsklip and Thyspunt “as the only suitable sites.”

Chivell told Mongabay that while he’s not opposed to nuclear energy, which could be important for South Africa’s low-carbon energy future, the environmental concerns previously raised for Bantamsklip remain valid today.

The site lies within a unique marine environment, where ocean currents create conditions for highly productive ecosystems, Chivell said. Bantamsklip neighbors Dyer Island Nature Reserve, which hosts southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), Cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus), sharks, dolphins, abalone and seabirds — including about 1,000 breeding pairs of African penguins.

Chivell said operating a nuclear plant at Bantamsklip could result in potential sediment disturbance, increased underwater noise, and chemical pollution, while heated water discharged back into the ocean could alter the currents and food web. Furthermore, the proposed dumping of the sand excavated during construction back into the sea could devastate kelp forests along the coastline, he said.

The ecological damage would undermine “decades of conservation and scientific research, as well as the nature-based tourism that sustains local livelihoods,” Chivell said.

He added that since the previous EIA for the second nuclear facility, conditions in the area have worsened. “African Penguins are now critically endangered, and local shark populations have declined dramatically,” he said. “Any new environmental assessment must be comprehensive, transparent, and ecosystem-wide.”

It’s a fundamental question for ecologists in this age: How are biodiversity losses reshaping how ecosystems function? A recent study quantifies the impact of biodiversity and abundance losses on ecological functions by tracking the energy flows within them.

“African wildlife has lost a third of its ecological power — the energy that drives vital ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, and carnivory or pest control,” Ty Loft, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., and first author of the paper published in the journal Nature, told Mongabay by email.

Conventional approaches that focus only on species abundance can tell us how animal populations have changed, for example, to what extent elephant numbers have fallen in a given region. But translating these changes into ecosystem-wide shifts is difficult, and doing so across thousands of species in a variety of ecosystems is a mammoth challenge.

Ecological energetics quantifies how species shape ecosystems through their food intake, their ecological roles, and the energy that flows through them.

Energy is constantly being transferred from vegetation to animals, between animals, and from animals back to the environment. The natural realm isn’t a static space with animals tacked onto it; these are living, breathing worlds with which animals inhabit and interact. Take vegetation: animals directly shape the landscape by grazing and browsing (eating), and indirectly through the dispersal of seeds and nutrients (e.g., through pooping).

In the paper, Loft and his colleagues focused on nearly 3,000 bird and mammal species in sub-Saharan Africa. They considered 23 ecosystem functions, ranging from pollination to nutrient disposal, grouped them into 10 function classes, and then grouped the animals according to the ecological roles they play. By taking into account species present in an area, their abundance, body sizes, diets, and metabolic rates, they turned the animal’s food consumption into a measure of energy flow: kilojoules per square meter per year. This formula captures how much energy animals in an ecological function guild consume and expend, a proxy for the power channeled into an environmental function.

The authors traced the extent to which energy flows have diminished compared to historical values, i.e., before humans began altering them in significant ways. In this case, the authors took as their baseline the year 1700.

In general, the “ecological power” of wild mammals and birds weakened drastically, by about 60%, in areas that had been converted to agricultural land in the study area. However, in well-managed protected areas, ecological functions are almost 90% intact. For example, the study documented a striking decline in ecological functions performed by megafauna such as elephants outside protected areas in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The paper offers quite unique and novel insights,” Santiago Soliveres Codina, an ecologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email. “The nice thing about using the energetic approach is that it is able to establish a functional ‘importance’ for each species, comparable across species, based on how much energy it moves throughout the ecosystem, and between ecosystems.”

The approach better captures the relative importance of animals to ecosystems by accounting for food consumption rather than only biomass or size. Take, for example, birds or small mammals like rodents, which are small in size but consume and process energy faster.

“They burn through calories very quickly. And all of that eating has a big impact on ecosystems, including by spreading seeds, controlling insect and pest populations, and pollinating plants, among other impacts,” Loft said.

For Codina, this finding is striking. “What was quite interesting to see for me is the unexpected[ly] large role of birds and small mammals, despite their small sizes, in the energy flow across ecosystems,“ he said, “or how the key animals change from one type of ecosystem [forest] to another [drylands].”

A method that relies solely on changes in animal abundance will not faithfully capture ecosystem changes, as it assigns equal weight to all species. “In reality, some species disproportionately affect ecosystem function owing to their population densities, body sizes, dietary preferences, rates of food consumption and features,” the paper notes.

Innovative as it is, ecological power alone may not capture all the ways ecosystems have changed in response to human-caused impacts.

“In particular, energy flow needs to remain coupled with consideration of the number of species contributing to energy flow to avoid wrongly labelling the persistence of a few generalist species as ecological intactness,” the paper said.

Analyzing ecological processes this way is also a data-heavy exercise. Codina described the approach as “really data demanding,” adding that the data on current and historical abundances of wild animals rely on models and estimates. “Solid as they are, of course, they will have some errors,” he said.

Because calculating energy flows isn’t just about how much food animals eat, but the rates at which they metabolize the food, Codina raised the possibility that metabolic efficiency could have changed in wild animals living on lands impacted by humans, a factor the study didn’t account for.

“Any large study such as this one rests on many assumptions, combines many datasets, and therefore includes a substantial amount of uncertainty,” Loft said, adding “[it] may not be able to usefully guide action within a specific ecosystem.”

However, such analysis can shed light on the “big picture changes to the world’s biodiversity and its ecosystems,” Loft said.

Codina agreed that these kinds of results can help shape conservation policy. They “can help when choosing which species to reintroduce first in restoration programs, or which places or species to prioritize in conservation,” he said.

Since being collared in Zambia two years ago, a young bull elephant known to researchers as Z16 has walked nearly 12,000 kilometers, or 7,500 miles — three times the distance between New York and Los Angeles. In that time, Z16 has traversed four countries and visited six national parks.

In Southern Africa overall, populations of elephants are stable, or even growing, but space for them is not. This pressure has increased human-elephant conflict and fueled calls from some for elephant culls. Z16’s epic trek underscores a quieter, more hopeful solution to the region’s so-called “elephant problem”: keeping the routes that connect fragmented ranges open through the creation and protection of wildlife corridors.

Situated in the northwestern corner of the Sobbe Wildlife Conservancy, in Namibia’s long, narrow Zambezi region, the Sobbe Corridor provides a link for elephants moving between Botswana, Zambia and Angola.

When environmental anthropologist Emilie Köhler began her fieldwork in Sobbe in January 2023, she saw the crooked boughs of trees inside the corridor shaped by countless generations of African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) rubbing their backs as they passed through.

“They come into [Namibia’s] Mudumu National Park, then they use the Sobbe Corridor to move into the Zambezi State Forest [also inside Namibia] and then go into Zambia and Angola,” she says. “It connects different protected areas, but also links movements between different countries, which makes it extremely important.”

‘Elephant infrastructure’

Wildlife corridors play a disproportionately large role in facilitating the migrations of elephants and other wild animals within the vast landscape known as the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA-TFCA), home to 228,000 elephants and around 3 million people. Corridors like Sobbe, which is just 6 km long and 4 km wide (3.7 by 2.5 mi), are like pressure release valves, says Robin Naidoo, a lead scientist with WWF-US.

“They’re kind of fundamental pieces of ecological infrastructure,” he says, “and just like we need to maintain our own infrastructure and make sure things are in good working order, we need to do the same for this ecological infrastructure if we’re going to be successful at conserving elephants and other species in KAZA.”

KAZA has the advantage of a permanent working group of elephant specialists who try to figure out where corridors and important areas for connectivity lie within its 520,000 square kilometers (201,000 square miles); discover barriers blocking potential corridors; increase awareness among decision-makers on their importance; and get corridors gazetted into countries’ land-use policies.

“That provides the starting point so that [the wildlife corridors] will stand the test of time,” Naidoo says.

Where corridors are kept open, both solitary bull elephants and female-headed herds can move across borders in sync with seasonal fluctuations of food and water.

‘Itchy feet’

Take Z16. Since he was collared by conservation NGO Elephant Connection north of Sioma Ngwezi National Park in Zambia in June 2023, he has used Sobbe and adjoining Mudumu National Park in Namibia in early 2024 to leave Zambia and cross back into northern Botswana, then headed down to Makgadikgadi National Park via the Okavango Delta. Although he appears to recognize Makgadikgadi in Botswana as home, he also recently took a trip to Hwange National Park, hundreds of kilometers to the east, in northwestern Zimbabwe.

Kerryn Carter, a wildlife biologist and founder of Elephant Connection, says Z16, as with other bull elephants, likely uses the onset of summer rains around November as his cue for moving.

“They’re not just randomly moving around,” she says. “They actually undertake journeys, as if they know where they’re going; I’m guessing they’re just old routes that have been known for a very long time.”

One of these routes is Sobbe, marked by its fresh elephant dung and trails snaking their way between the mopane (Colophospermum mopane) and Zambezi teak (Baikiaea plurijuga) trees.

Z16’s itchy feet may be because he’s a male. Data gathered from a total of 291 elephants collared in all five of the KAZA countries show that nearly half of them visited more than one country, but only 36% of these were females. Yet it’s the female-headed family groups that make up more than 85% of the region’s elephant population of nearly a quarter of a million.

Carter says barriers like large rivers and border fences present little obstacle to bulls, but are seldom crossed by cows and their herds; they have calves to worry about.

“If we don’t get the females moving, we’re not going to solve any overpopulation situations,” she adds.

Females may not cross rivers simply because they form a natural boundary to their home ranges, Naidoo says. Their reticence about crossing border or veterinary fences, even where these have fallen into disrepair, could be due to their memory of when these fences were electrified or more heavily patrolled by people, or because the remnants still pose a physical barrier to their calves.

Fenced landscapes

This is starkly illustrated in a map based on data collected by Naidoo and colleagues from collared female elephants, showing that neither those on the Namibian side nor those on the Botswanan side were ever willing to cross the border fence.

Removing fences would likely improve movement of female-headed herds. But even in fenced landscapes, long-range movements by females can occur, recent data show.

Three years ago, Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism collared a female elephant in the fenced Mahango Game Reserve, which, like Sobbe, is located in the country’s Zambezi region. In April this year, she abruptly left the reserve and walked 150 km (90 mi) to the west, to reach Khaudum National Park in Namibia’s Kavango East region, despite having to cross several fences, and without the aid of a designated wildlife corridor.

It was the first such movement for a female elephant recorded in more than 15 years of elephant satellite tracking in that part of Namibia, and illustrates that corridors aren’t the only means of helping connectivity.

“In some of these areas it’s less about a defined, specific micro-corridor, and more about just having sort of an overall permeability of the landscape,” Naidoo says.

Where human populations are dense, however, corridors like Sobbe continue to play an outsized role.

When Elephant Connection began collaring elephants in Sioma Ngwezi in 2017, for instance, Carter and colleagues counted a 150-strong herd. By the time a major KAZA aerial survey took place in 2022, that number had expanded to 552. Even though that increase isn’t in the tens of thousands needed to depopulate denser elephant ranges, Carter does credit Sobbe for aiding migration to Sioma Ngwezi from places like Namibia’s Bwabwata National Park.

Useful though they are, corridors intersect with human communities, meaning elephant connectivity is as much a political and social challenge as it is an ecological one.

Nomadic, crop-raiding elephants are a frequent and serious problem for some of the farmers who live close to the Sobbe Corridor, Köhler says. The farmers don’t receive compensation if their fields aren’t adequately protected, and putting up strong defenses is an investment many can’t afford. This means they need to camp out near their fields for weeks and use fires or drums to repel elephants at night, which can be dangerous.

Yet, people living around Sobbe remain highly tolerant of elephants, Köhler says.

This is likely to do with receiving at least some government compensation for crop damage and benefiting from being part of a wildlife conservancy.

Community members get jobs as game guards; wildlife credits are paid to locals for ensuring the corridor stays intact; and the community earns income from the trophy hunting of a small number of elephants (four in 2023), which is in line with Namibia’s policy of community-based natural resource management.

Money raised from hunting elephants, which takes place in a part of the conservancy that’s away from the corridor, has been used to electrify people’s homes.

The outcome is coexistence that goes beyond mere tolerance.

Köhler recalls meeting a village headman at the start of her fieldwork in Sobbe, who told her the presence of elephants on their land was proof the country was “still alive.”

It was a community attitude she encountered again and again in the months that followed.

“They are proud of having [elephants], and they really value them being alive in the landscape,” Köhler says. “They want their children to be able to see wildlife, and not just to see it in books.”