Home About Me Science Journalism Books Columns Other Services

Feature Stories

Photo by Matthew Barra on Pexels
Mongabay Environmental News •

Culture and conservation thrive as Great Lakes tribes bring back native wild rice

In the late summer of 2023, thick stands of wild rice stood tall and shimmered gold in some of Lac du Flambeau’s lakes. The plant has been virtually absent in these lakes for decades, so for Joe Graveen, the sight of grain-filled stalks was a thing of joy, he says. As the wild rice program manager for the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a tribal band in northern Wisconsin, Graveen was seeing the fruits (or grains, literally) of hard work he and his tribe’s members had put
Photo by Tina Nord on Pexels
Deccan Herald •

Birders find help in artificial intelligence

Human relationships with birds have metamorphosed with time. From seeing them as a source of food, gathering their feathers, eggs and skin and hunting them for sport, we have come a long way in appreciating birds for what they are: intriguing life forms that aesthetically please our eyes and make sounds that are music to our ears. Our fascination has morphed into a hobby called birdwatching or birding, a term coined in the early 1900s by British ornithologist Edmund Selous.

When birding began a
Mongabay Environmental News •

Logging, road construction continue to fuel forest loss in Papua New Guinea

Plonked between the formidable Owen Stanley mountains to its west and the Solomon Sea to the east lies Oro, a remote province in Papua New Guinea east of the capital Port Moresby. Lush, green tropical rainforests, with their famed canopies, blanket the land while rivers and streams glitter in hues of turquoise and emerald—a landscape found across much of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where 71.8% of land still harbored primary forest in 2022, according to data from monitoring platform Global Forest Wat
Mongabay Environmental News •

Big promises to Indigenous groups from new global nature fund — but will it deliver?

VANCOUVER — The devastating wildfires in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, in mid-August, forced the province into a state of emergency and gloom. But just a few days later, as the smoky skies of Vancouver began to clear up, environmentalists found a reason to cheer.

About 1,500 delegates representing environmental ministries, youth, women, Indigenous Peoples, and civil society gathered in the coastal city to promise a slew of actions to save the planet’s biodiversity. One of them came
Deccan Herald •

When storms disrupt life underwater

When cool air blows over warmer oceans in the tropics, it heats up, picks up moisture and rises. Soon, cooler air from the surroundings swirls to fill the gap, gets heated and rises to form clouds. Over time, this system of clouds grows, and the wind spins faster and faster, with gusts over 100 km/hour. A tropical cyclone is born.

However, severe tropical cyclones can uproot kilometres of vegetation and sea life from the seafloor and along the coast. While massive-but-mobile life forms, like wh
Nature •

How to make the leap into industry after a PhD

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Spoorthy Raman is a freelance science and environment journalist in St. John’s, Canada.

Landing that first job in industry requires planning, homework and networking — and a bit of soul-searching.

Melanie Zeppel stepped off the academic path to become a data scientist in industry. Credit: Stephen Jackson

Plant physiologist Melanie Zeppel had heard that hard work, a good publication list and securing highly competitive postdoctoral
Mongabay Environmental News •

Progress is slow on Africa’s Great Green Wall, but some bright spots bloom

The southern fringes of the Sahara are dynamic. As rainfall varies, land patches on the edge chop and change between green and arid brown. Human activities, like overgrazing, deforestation or poor irrigation, further degrade some of the already arid parts of the Sahel, resulting in desertification. As the planet heats up, changes in rainfall patterns can cause longer dry spells on the southern boundaries of the Sahara, stretching the desert further down, and affecting nearly a million people and
Deccan Herald •

Snakebite: India’s silent killer

Inherently shy, snakes can turn defensive when disturbed or threatened. The slithering reptiles then bite by injecting a cocktail of toxins at the intruder through their fangs. Based on the species of snake, the toxins can over time cause respiratory paralysis, bleeding, breakdown of muscle fibres, shocks, organ failures, and death. It only takes a few hours to sniff out human life with a snake bite.

Studies estimate that each year, about five million snake bites occur around the world, while 8
Mongabay Environmental News •

Volunteers, First Nations work to bring back a disappearing oak prairie

On the eastern edge of Victoria, British Columbia, abutting the Salish Sea, sits Uplands Park, spanning about 30 hectares, or 74 acres, amid the bustling municipality of Oak Bay. Although an urban park, it lacks manicured lawns, ornamental flowers or asphalted walkways — quintessential elements of modern-day urban parks.

Instead, the landscape is sprinkled with stunted, gnarled and crooked oak trees. A few shrubs of snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) and ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor), and som
Mongabay-India •

Habitat loss due to tourism in the Western Ghats pushes endangered frogs to the edge

The picturesque Munnar in Kerala, with its lush green tea gardens carpet rolling hills, sits at the south of biodiversity hotspot that is the Western Ghats. Coffee and cardamom plantations intersperse the tea gardens, giving this lofty range the name Cardamom Hills. Groves of eucalyptus, black wattle and acacia — trees grown for firewood and timber — are peppered within these plantations.

Patches of shola forests — stunted tropical montane forests which once covered all these hills — lie scatte
Scroll.in •

Tourism boom in Kerala’s Western Ghats threatens to wipe out habitat of endemic frog species

Nestled within the lofty Cardamom Hills, which forms part of the Western Ghats Unesco World Heritage Site, lies the picturesque town of Munnar in Kerala. Lush green tea gardens carpet the rolling hills of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, interspersed by coffee and cardamom plantations. Groves of eucalyptus, black wattle and acacia – trees grown for firewood and timber – are peppered within these plantations.

Patches of shola forests – stunted tropical montane forests which once covere
Mongabay Environmental News •

As tourism booms in India’s Western Ghats, habitat loss pushes endangered frogs to the edge

Nestled within the lofty Cardamom Hills, which forms part of the Western Ghats UNESCO World Heritage Site, lies the picturesque town of Munnar in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Lush green tea gardens carpet the rolling hills of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, interspersed by coffee and cardamom plantations. Groves of eucalyptus, black wattle and acacia—trees grown for firewood and timber—are peppered within these plantations.

Patches of shola forests—stunted tropical montane fo
Hakai Magazine •

Shining the Light on Baby Crabs

It’s a gray summer evening on Galiano Island, a long strip of land about 1.5 kilometers across at its narrowest. Home to nearly 1,400 people, it is one of the 200-odd islands and islets in the Gulf Islands archipelago dotting the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and the mainland coast. The air here at the wooden pier in Whaler Bay on the island’s southeast end is heavy and moist, tinged with a whiff of boat fuel and old wood, and infused with sea salt. Amid a lineup of moto
Ancient Forest Alliance •

Indigenous funding model is a win-win for ecosystems and local economies in Canada

• First Nations in the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii of Canada, have successfully invested in conservation initiatives that have benefited ecosystems while also increasing communities’ well-being over the past 15 years, a recent report shows.
• Twenty-seven First Nations spent nearly C$109 million ($79 million) toward 439 environmental and economic development projects in their territories, inclu
BioScience •

Mining the sea floor: Implications for biodiversity

An air of urgency permeates the offices of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the international agency in Kingston, Jamaica, tasked with regulating mining-related activities on the ocean floor. Overlooking the Caribbean Sea through their windows, representatives from the 168 member states are scrambling to finalize the Mining Code, a rule book that will govern the commercial extraction of deep sea minerals.

For over a decade, different organs of the ISA have been working toward framing r
The Social Commons •

Indigenous funding model a win-win for ecosystems and local economies in Canada

• First Nations in the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii of Canada, have successfully invested in conservation initiatives that have benefited ecosystems while also increasing communities’ well-being over the past 15 years, a recent report shows.
• Twenty-seven First Nations spent nearly C$109 million ($79 million) toward 439 environmental and economic development projects in their territories, including initiating research, habitat r
Mongabay Environmental News •

Indigenous funding model is a win-win for ecosystems and local economies in Canada

Over the past 15 years, First Nations in Haida Gwaii and central and northern coastal British Columbia, Canada, have turned the tables around: once subjected to massive economic, social and cultural damages due to the extractive logging industry, they have now successfully built a sustainable economy that focuses on protecting sensitive ecosystems, while increasing communities’ well-being, a recent report shows.

The report was released by Coast Funds, an Indigenous-led conservation finance orga
Mongabay Environmental News •

As sea lice feast away on dwindling salmon, First Nations decide the fate of salmon farms

VANCOUVER, Canada — Alongside the millions of Atlantic Salmon clustered in the open net pens that dot the waterways around Broughton Archipelago’s over 200 islands, sea lice, a tadpole-shaped parasite, feast on the fish.

In the zeal to establish a salmon market northwest of Vancouver, Canada, many aquaculture companies set up open net pens—cage-like structures where a layer of fishnet separates the farmed salmon from those in the wild—in the 1980s. They were also, however, creating conducive co
Deccan Herald •

2022: The year in science

For millennia, art has been a pursuit unique to humankind. This year, however, machines have made their mark, and probably tease us with their interpretation of art. In April, artificial intelligence company OpenAI released DALL-E 2, a software that can generate digital images from word descriptors called “prompts”. In the following months, similar software took the art world by storm: while some were awed at these machine-generated art pieces, others questioned if it was the end of art as we kn
Hakai Magazine •

In Graphic Detail: The Polar Silk Route

On November 15, 2022, Chinese sailor Zhai Mo and his two-person crew sailed back to Shanghai after almost a year and a half of travel that took them through Arctic waters. The expedition took about a year longer than anticipated—unpredictable weather, ice, and cold temperatures all made the trip through the Northwest Passage tricky for the 24-meter-long ketch, Zhai Mo 1. But the trip drew attention to China’s 2018 announcement of the latest addition to its ambitious revival of the ancient Mariti
Deccan Herald •

When microplastics flood rivers

The Pitcairn Islands, a group of four volcanic islands, lie smack in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, between South America and Australia. In 2019, when scientists visited Henderson Island, one of the islands with no people, they were baffled to find over four billion plastic pieces on the pristine beaches!

With plastic comprising over 80% of the ocean litter, it’s no surprise they found their way to the island, hitchhiking on the waves. But, how do plastics from land come to the oceans?
Deccan Herald •

Satellites show high methane emissions from Indian landfills

Our muck stinks. We grip our noses tight to avoid the stench and throw our garbage far away, hoping the odour doesn’t trace its way back. Sadly, there’s no escaping the muck monster as it comes back at us in unexpected ways, like climate change. Without good waste segregation practices, more than half of our garbage ends up in landfills—mountains of garbage lining the perimeters of our cities.

Landfills contain a melange of our household waste—wet, organic waste like kitchen scraps, dry recycla
Load More