“It was like looking at a mini-Grand Canyon,” said Sikorsky, a Kansas State University graduate research assistant in the Park Management and Conservation Departments of Horticulture and Natural Resources.

“The Nature Conservancy needed a conservation solution that could tackle bycatch challenges while still providing economic opportunities for sustainable fishing in coastal fishing communities,” said Dr. Alexis Jackson, Fishery Project Director with TNC’s California Oceans Program.

This swamp and the adjoining lands contain some of the last large wetlands in drought-prone New South Wales, making it a critical lifeline for water birds, like straw-necked ibis, yellow-billed spoonbill, and Australian pelicans.

Today, there’s a new movement afoot known as natural landscaping: using native trees, shrubs, and low plants to add textural diversity to a yard while attracting and benefiting wildlife.

Photo © TNC As a Nature Conservancy forester in Pennsylvania , Mike Eckley spends a lot of time assessing the health of woodlands.Beginning in 2008, Eckley set out trail cameras to monitor white-tailed deer, including their health and buck to doe ratios.

“Platypus travel quite a few kilometers in a night, so you don’t want the net sites too close together,” says Brunt.Brunt tells us that very little research has been done on platypus in Queensland, which means conservationists don’t have the data they need.

Hausheer / TNC For women in the Solomon Islands, like Alice Hou, decisions about how to use natural resources can change lives — for better or worse.

Photo © Nikolaj Lasbo / TNC These “passport stamps” are data points that help us understand that kestrel’s movements and migrations throughout its life — and HawkWatch staff and volunteers have now banded about 2,000 kestrels since 2013.

In fact, it was a whole new twist on the concept of “reality” and the ways technology could transform how people experience and therefore respond – and take action – to confront the global reality check of all reality checks: climate change.

It was the very nesting box that TNC had fitted with a webcam last year — successfully capturing the entrancing story of kestrel parents raising their brood of five chicks — all broadcast live online.

We assembled tree cover maps for 97 US cities, housing 59 million people, and analyzed how much current urban tree cover reduces summer air temperatures and associated heat-related health impacts and electricity consumption.

Fishermen from Morro Bay, Half Moon Bay, and Fort Bragg formed an initial working group with TNC to explore the formation of a cooperative agreement aimed at reducing bycatch of overfished species and providing benefits to fishermen members, like reduced financial risk and uncertainty.

Join CGS reporter Cara Byington as she learns how these conservation dogs help scientists monitor and protect these rare reptiles in their native prairie habitat.

A new paper shows that managing existing protected areas to a better standard is often a smarter investment of new funds than purchasing additional land. Given limited funding for conservation, countries are often faced with a choice: spend money on creating new protected areas, or allocating that money to better manage existing protected areas.

Published in Coral Reefs , this research evaluates the effectiveness of locally-managed marine protected areas (MPAs) in Roviana Lagoon, Solomon Islands. Community-based management fails to halt declines of bumphead parrotfish and humphead wrasse in Roviana Lagoon, Solomon Islands.

Balneario Camboriu view from the bay with partial watershed © Timm Kroeger/TNC In the first rigorous, peer-reviewed study on water fund Return on Investment (ROI) for cities in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, TNC scientists examine the Camboriú Water Fund and show that nature can be a cost-effective solution for improving urban water supplies and reducing treatment costs.

In September 2018, I joined Nature Conservancy scientists on journey to Manus, Papua New Guinea , where local communities are banding together to sustainably manage their sea cucumber stocks. About 26 sea cucumber species are harvested in Papua New Guinea, and the two most valuable species are white teat and sandfish.

“The people within MENAR are saltwater people, they rely heavily on the sea, to the point that if their fish stocks collapse it would be a catastrophe,” says Pete Waldie , a coastal fisheries scientist with The Nature Conservancy’s Melanesia program .

“But it’s illegal to sell turtles, take their eggs, or to kill a female that is nesting on the beach.” Those restrictions are put in place to protect sea turtles from overharvesting, as most species have experienced catastrophic population declines in the last few decades.

“Now we realize these are all caused by CO2 pollution,” says Dr. David Vaughan who directs coral-reef restoration for the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory at Summerland Key, Florida. Microfragmented Orbicella annularis, or boulder star corals, growing in nursery Photo © Dave Vaughan / Mote Tropical Research Laboratory