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

You can’t dictate a solution to the worldwide plastic pollution crisis, according to Julio Cordano, the new chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) for a global plastic treaty. He said consensus will be needed. Cordano was elected INC chair in February 2026. That appointment came after INC repeatedly failed to meet its own deadlines for achieving an agreement to deal with the world’s rapidly escalating plastic pollution crisis. INC began treaty negotiations in 2022 with the goal of achieving an agreement by 2024. But negotiators remain deadlocked and nowhere near an accord. That puts Cordano — a career Chilean diplomat and director of the Environment, Climate Change and Oceans Division of Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — in a difficult position. Today, 184 nations, known as the parties, can’t even agree on whether a treaty should include binding limits on plastic production (a stance held by the roughly 70 High Ambition Coalition member nations), or focus only on voluntary plastic waste management, reuse and recycling (a position held by the Like Minded Group of a handful of petrostates). Talks continue this year, but INC doesn’t expect another formal negotiating session until March 2027 at the earliest. With Cordano in the challenging position of finding common ground between the parties, Mongabay reached out for an exclusive interview to determine his hopes and concerns for the treaty process. He doesn’t often speak to the press and declined a Mongabay interview request, but agreed to answer questions submitted in writing.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

More than a decade ago, conservationists began working to preserve a unique population of desert pampas cats that has adapted to the mangroves of Peru’s northern coast. This small, isolated population roams the San Pedro de Vice dry mangroves, a Ramsar Site and South America’s southernmost mangrove ecosystem. “This is a very unique population, because as far as we know, [it] is the only Pampas cat population that lives in a mangrove [habitat],” Alvaro Garcia, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project, told Mongabay in an email. The desert pampas cat (Leopardus garleppi), distinctive for its broad face, ranges along a relatively thin band snaking southward from Colombia through Peru and Bolivia, to northern Chile and Argentina. The species is acclimated to dry conditions, so inhabits deserts, grasslands and dry forests, and isn’t found living in mangroves anywhere else aside from this region of Peru. Dry mangrove forests, also called scrub or dwarf mangrove forests, grow in highly saline soils in upper intertidal zones, so lack regular daily flushing by ocean tides. At first, it was thought the dry mangrove-acclimated cats were faring well: “[I]n the mangrove [habitat], we put cameras out for a week, and we got tons of photos,” whereas in other parts of the felid’s range, conservationists barely capture one desert pampas cat image per month, said Cindy Hurtado, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project. Based on the photos, the research team assumed the…This article was originally published on Mongabay