The Brazilian Government has created an important protected area in Amazonia that will safeguard both iconic wildlife such as jaguars, giant otters and other species as well as the livelihoods of people who depend on natural resources.

WCS and WWF issued a report this week revealing that nearly a million square kilometers, or 386,000 square miles, of tropical intact forest landscapes (IFLs) are overlapped by extractive industries thereby posing a significant threat to these pristine regions. 

University of Queensland (UQ) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researchers argue that the world needs more diverse, ambitious and area-specific targets for retaining important natural systems to safeguard humanity. The findings are published in Nature Ecology and Evolution (DOI:10.1038/s41559-018-0595-2)

He’s a father of 20 from nine different mothers. He’s a fierce defender of his family and helped nurse two of his offspring back from leopard attacks. He likes to nap with his feet in the air, and he hums while he eats. Meet Kingo, a wild silverback gorilla who is celebrating his 40^th birthday.

 

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA (May 22, 2018) — After a two-and-a-half-year expedition through the world’s most biodiverse protected area, the Identidad Madidi explorers have concluded their epic quest of completing a massive biological survey of Madidi National Park, uncovering more than 120 potentially new species of plants, butterflies and vertebrates in the process, according to WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).

A shocking study in the journal Science by the University of Queensland, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and University of Northern British Columbia confirms that one third of the world’s protected areas – an astonishing 2.3 million square miles or twice the size of the state of Alaska – are now under intense human pressure including road building, grazing, and urbanization.

A massive decade-long study of Western Equatorial Africa’s gorillas and chimpanzees has uncovered both good news and bad about our nearest relatives. The good news: there are one third more western lowland gorillas and one tenth more central chimpanzees than previously thought. The bad news: the vast majority of these great apes (80 percent) exist outside of protected areas, and gorilla populations are declining by 2.7 percent annually.

Six Indonesians pleaded guilty yesterday to charges for trespassing into the Lanjak-Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary, a hotspot for wildlife crime including the illegal extraction of internationally protected agarwood.

SANTIAGO, Chile (March 16, 2018) – The Government of Chile has officially designated Admiralty Sound (Seno Almirantazgo)—a scenic and biologically diverse 80-kilometer-long (49 miles) fjord—Tierra del Fuego’s first marine protected area (MPA), according to WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).

OUESSO, Republic of Congo (March 9, 2018)— Conservationists from the WCS Congo Program have captured incredible video of a western lowland gorilla newborn living in the rainforests of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. The infant was barely a week old when the footage was shot last month, according to the WCS scientists who managed to capture the footage.