Secondary Forest

Pangolins are fascinating creatures known for their unique appearance and distinctive scales. They are mammals belonging to the order Pholidota and are native to Africa and Asia. Due to their primary diet of ants and termites, pangolins are often referred to as "scaly anteaters".

The sustainable management of the world's forests takes centre stage at the UN Forum on Forests, which opened on Monday at UN Headquarters in New York. Stakeholders from across the world, from Member States to civil society partners, will gather to discuss this critical planetary resource. Here are 5 key things you need to know:

Cast your mind back to the spring of 2020, when grocery store shelves sat bare of essential items and ingredients. For birds who live in the forests of Central America, replacement of forest land with coffee plantations essentially "clears out the shelves" of their preferred foods, causing them to shift their diets and habitats to survive.

As UN climate talks close in Egypt and biodiversity talks begin in Montreal, attention is on forest restoration as a solution to the twin issues roiling our planet. Forests soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide and simultaneously create habitat for organisms. So far, efforts to help forests bounce back from deforestation have typically focused on increasing one thing—trees—over anything else.

Ashaninka woman by a sacred kapok tree. Credit: André Dib

To the untrained eye, the small community garden on Coast and Straits Salish territory—on what passersby commonly know as the University of Victoria campus—might look unruly. Bursting with dandelions, lamb's ear and grasses, it's difficult to tell where the garden starts and where it ends.

The largest rainforests host a variety of unique plants and animals.

Forest advocates said the National Old Growth Amendment allowed too much logging, while the timber industry called it too restrictive.

A group of researchers has found that the key criteria according to which areas of the Atlantic Rainforest can be legally cleared by their owners are defined in too "subjective and imprecise" a manner in Brazil's environmental legislation, allowing for the destruction of valuable forest that provides important ecosystem services.

Entomologists have described a new species of the ant genus Paraparatrechina from Yingku village in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh, northeastern India.

In 1938, an article noted that some of the tree trunks were bigger than four feet around.

How are environmental changes, loss of biodiversity, and the spread of pathogens connected? The answer is a puzzle. Scientists from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin in cooperation with the Leibniz-IZW have now described one piece of that puzzle in a study on the effects of rainforest clearing on mosquitoes and the viruses they carry in the journal eLife.

Here's a climate solution we can all get behind: don't kill elephants. Or poach gorillas—or wipe out tapirs, hornbills, or other large-bodied wildlife that eat fruit and disperse large seeds. That's because a new paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has found that overhunting these species makes forests less able to store or sequester carbon. The authors describe their results in the journal PLOS Biology.

A new curriculum tells a more inclusive history of public land preservation & access in the United States.

A new study mapping the potential scale of forest restoration globally shows that prioritizing 1.5 billion hectares of degraded forest—an area almost the size of Russia—could significantly boost effectiveness of meeting climate and biodiversity goals. The results of the study are described in the journal Conservation Biology.

Rubber-based agroforestry systems are sustainable intercropping systems in which farmers grow multiple crops or livestock alongside rubber trees to improve their income and/or livelihoods, while also reaping the subsequent ecological benefits. However, it is unknown whether adding more intercropped species to the rubber–tea agroforestry system increases the benefits.

The grasslands of India and elsewhere do not need to have economic value to be worth studying and preserving

From jaguars and ocelots to anteaters and capybara, most land-based mammals living in the Brazilian Amazon are threatened by climate change and the projected savannization of the region. That's according to a study published in the journal Animal Conservation by the University of California, Davis.

Fires, land conversion, logging and water shortages have weakened resilience of 2.5m sq km of forest, says study

Intensively used land isn't just harmful to biodiversity we can see—it's also harming the wildlife living under the ground.