Jeff Reed wasn’t raised to hate wolves. But as a child he bought into the Little Red Riding Hood myth regarding their villainous nature. You see one, you shoot it. But not on a night on his Montana farm some five years ago, a night that proved life-changing not only for Reed, but perhaps for the study and conservation of wolves. “I thought it was a large coyote,” Reed recalls. “It was standing broadside in my [pickup truck] headlights, like 10 yards away, this big, beautiful gray wolf. And he’s just looking at me. I open the door, grab my rifle, and he’s standing there … I’m pointing my barrel, looking at it. “Then all of a sudden — you can call it an Apostle Paul sees Jesus for the first time and goes blind moment — and I just go, ‘What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?’ So I shot over its back, like way high. It didn’t bolt. It just trotted right beside me … and kept going.” Reed heeded that night’s sacred call. It wasn’t long before wolf indifference morphed into obsession, and led to his linking up with the world’s leading long-term wolf research effort. Which may seem like an odd fit, Reed being a Ph.D. linguist who spent much of his career up to that point leading software engineering for Silicon Valley firms. But all that knowledge has intertwined perfectly: The Cry Wolf Project is grounded in bioacoustics and artificial intelligence…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Amazon-based scientists have long known that rapidly rising temperatures mean that places where species live today won’t be where they live tomorrow. For a vast number of species — ranging from insects, birds and primates to all manner of plants — upslope migration could present a potential, though perilous, pathway to resilience and survival during the climate crisis. This knowledge has raised a vital question: What are the most likely and best protected routes by which species across the Amazon’s broad expanse can relocate upward, helping preserve biodiversity, and hopefully keeping intact the ecosystem services tropical forests now deliver? In what is deemed the first region-wide assessment of Amazonia’s climate resilience and connectivity, a new study points to the western part of the biome, particularly the Andean spine of Peru, as the most viable upslope corridors. According to researchers, this region has the highest concentration of key components needed to support species survival — including major elevation gradients, large established protected areas, and connected forested corridors to facilitate upslope species migration. The scientists pinpointed additional potential corridors in southwestern Colombia, northern Brazil, northern Bolivia, north-central Guyana, and western Suriname. But these areas are disadvantaged due to fewer protected areas, with connectivity in many locales broken by forest fragmentation due to deforestation and oil and gas drilling. Published in May in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, the new study, titled “A regional-scale assessment of climate-resilient corridors and connectivity in the Amazon,” was undertaken with the goal of providing findings that…This article was originally published on Mongabay