Category Archives: Ecological Restoration

Reforestation Drones Can Plant 100K Trees In An Hour

Sure, it’ll be great when a drone can drop off your Amazon Prime goodies or 7-Eleven snacks just minutes after you order them… but it’ll be even better when they help regrow millions of trees. That’s what U.K.-based BioCarbon Engineering has set out to do. The company has been developing a high-tech system that uses drones…

North America’s most endangered bird faces a new threat: feuding wildlife managers

North America’s most endangered bird, the grasshopper sparrow that inhabits Central Florida’s shrinking prairie, is facing a new threat: a feud among wildlife managers and scientists. In a letter to researchers last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it planned to shut down a Palm Beach County breeding program, the larger of only…

The viceroy butterfly is a mimic, modeling its orange-and-black colors after the queen butterfly, a bug that tastes so disgusting predators have learned not to eat it or anything that looks like it, including viceroys. The apparent dependence of mimics on their models made biologists wonder if the fates of the two species are forever…

Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests

Replenishing the world’s forests on a grand scale would suck enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cancel out a decade of human emissions, according to an ambitious new study. Scientists have established there is room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees to grow in parks, woods and abandoned land across the planet. If such a goal were…

Butterflies Vs. Border Wall: National Butterfly Center Seeks Restraining Order

The National Butterfly Center, in danger of losing access to most of its wildlife nature preserve along the Rio Grande, is asking a court to stop federal officials from building a border wall across its land. The North American Butterfly Association first sued more than a year ago after government officials allegedly cut down trees and cleared…

Why are insects in decline, and can we do anything about it?

What is the sixth mass extinction? Many scientists think the current worldwide annihilation of wildlife is the beginning of a huge loss of species on Earth. It has happened five times in the last 4bn years, as a result of meteorite impacts, long ice ages and huge volcanic eruptions. But this one is the result not of…

Environmentalists to sue over delay in protecting rare Miami beetle and other species

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue federal wildlife managers on Tuesday for failing to protect dozens of rare species, including the Miami tiger beetle, one of the rarest insects in the U.S. found only on a tiny patch of pine rockland in Miami-Dade County. In 2016, after adding the beetle…

The Miami blue was fluttering toward extinction. Then the scientists showed up

One crisp, sunny afternoon this month, grad student Sarah Steele Cabrera headed down a sandy path at Long Key State Park carrying two nylon bug containers. Cabrera had scouted out the park, a former fishing camp fashioned into an early version of glamping by railroad tycoon Henry Flagler and now a tangle of gumbo limbo,…

Butterfly sanctuary expected to be plowed over for Trump’s border wall

A protected habitat of butterflies along the Rio Grande is expected to be plowed over to clear the way for President Trump's border wallafter the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed a challenge by environmental groups. The justices this week upheld a District Court ruling to allow the Trump administration to bypass 28 federal laws, including the Endangered…

Early Thanksgiving Counts Show a Critically Low Monarch Population in California

The California overwintering population has been reduced to less than 0.5% of its historical size, and has declined by 86% compared to 2017. Each year, during a three-week period around Thanksgiving, scores of volunteers fan out through coastal California to find and count overwintering monarch butterflies as part of the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count. The results…