Mongabay Newscast

On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Leah Barclay, a sound artist, acoustic ecologist, and researcher with Griffith University in South East Queensland, Australia. We discuss the ever broadening field of acoustic ecology, the many ways that marine bioacoustics is growing in importance, and she describes the new spectrogram app she's developing plus the creative ways she uses her interactive soundscape art to get kids excited about engaging with nature via hydrophones connected to cell phones. Plus we round up the week's top news and hear some of her recordings of marine life, ranging from whales to shrimp and even insects. Please share a review of the Mongabay Newscast in the Apple Podcasts app, iTunes store, Stitcher page, or wherever you get your podcasts from! Your feedback will help us improve the show and find new listeners. Simply go to the show's page on whichever platform you get it from, and find the 'review' or 'rate' section. Thanks!

On this episode we speak with Crystal Davis, the director of Global Forest Watch, a near-real-time forest monitoring system. GFW uses data from satellites and elsewhere to inform forest conservation initiatives and reporting worldwide. Davis shares her thoughts on how GFW's being used and the ways Big Data is changing how we approach conservation. We also speak with Francesca Cunninghame, Mangrove Finch Project Leader for the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands. In this Field Notes segment, we’ll listen to the call of a mangrove finch, one of the rarest birds in the wild, and hear about how its population seems to be growing, finally. Please share a review of the Mongabay Newscast in the Apple Podcasts app, iTunes store, Stitcher page, or wherever you get your podcasts from! Your feedback will help us improve the show and find new listeners. Simply go to the show's page on whichever platform you get it from, and find the 'review' or 'rate' section. Thanks!

During this episode we speak with Sue Palminteri, editor of Mongabay’s WildTech site which highlights high- and low-tech solutions to challenges in conservation. She shares with us some of the most interesting technologies and trends that she sees as having the biggest potential to transform the way we go about conserving Earth’s natural resources and wildlife. Also on the program we feature a live-taped conversation with Jonathan Thompson and Clarisse Hart, two scientists with the Harvard Forest, a long-term ecological research station belonging to Harvard University, which has made a number of important discoveries. If you enjoy this podcast, please write a review of the Mongabay Newscast in the Apple Podcasts app, iTunes store, Stitcher page, or wherever you get your podcasts! Your feedback will help us improve the show and find new listeners. Thanks. 

On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we’re thrilled to feature a conversation with the one and only Paul Simon, who's just announced a tour in support of the environment. The 12-time Grammy-winning musician recently announced on Mongabay.com that he is embarking on a 17-date US concert tour, with all proceeds benefitting Half-Earth, an initiative of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. We play parts of the interview with Paul Simon as he discusses his long-time friendship with E.O. Wilson, the power of optimism, and why Dr. Wilson’s Half-Earth idea inspired him to get involved. Also on the program, we round up the top conservation news and feature another Field Notes segment, this time with Zuzana Burivalova, a conservation scientist at Princeton University who has recorded the soundscapes of over 100 sites in the Indonesian part of Borneo. We listen to a variety of those recordings, each made in a different type of habitat, from protected rainforest to an oil palm plantation, and Burivalova explains what we’re hearing — and in some cases, what we’re not hearing. If you enjoy this podcast, please write a review of the Mongabay Newscast in the Apple Podcasts app, iTunes store, Stitcher page, or wherever you get your podcasts! Your feedback will help us improve the show and find new listeners. Thanks.

On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we welcome contributing editor Glenn Scherer to the program, who is responsible for Mongabay’s “Almost Famous Animals” series, which just wrapped up its second year with a focus on little-known Asian wildlife. Many conservationists argue that protecting charismatic species like tigers, rhinos, and orangutans will also lead to the protection of less widely known species such as pangolins and langurs, but that has not always been the case. Many lesser known species often fall through the cracks, so this series aims to raise their profiles. And in the Field Notes segment, Luca Pozzi discusses a new genus of galagos, or bushbabies, found in southeastern Africa that he helped discover. We'll play some calls made by galagos in the wild, and Luca explains how those recordings aid in our scientific knowledge about this kind of wildlife.

With so much uncertainty around the new Trump Administration's environmental priorities, especially its energy and climate policies, this episode is dedicated to trying to answer some of the biggest questions. We welcome three guests: firstly, Harvard professor, climate historian, and noted author Naomi Oreskes talks about what stories she’s worried will get lost in the media’s hyperfocus on the chaos surrounding the new Trump Administration, and she makes an evidence-based case for why scientists should be speaking out about their work in public. Then Bobby Magill joins us, he's a senior science writer for Climate Central and the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, which recently released a special report entitled “Turbulent Prospects on Environment-Energy Beat Likely in Trump Era.” Finally, Jeff Ruch, executive director of the non-profit service organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility shares what he’s hearing from employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about their concerns with the Trump Administration’s environmental policies. Want to stay up to date on all of Mongabay’s coverage of the issues you follow most closely? You can get email alerts when we publish new stories at Mongabay.com on specific topics that you care most about, from forests and oceans to indigenous people's rights and more. Visit alerts.mongabay.com and sign up to keep on top of all your top issues. Please leave a review of the show wherever you hear this podcast, it will help us improve and find new listeners! If you don't subscribe to the show but would like to, find the Mongabay Newscast via Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, Google Play, or other apps.

This week we speak with journalist Sue Branford, a regular contributor to Mongabay who has been reporting from Brazil since 1979 for the BBC and others. Branford is one of the writers behind a hard-hitting new series in English and Portuguese that Mongabay.com is producing with The Intercept-Brasil exploring the many impacts of massive dam development projects in Brazil’s Tapajos Basin. The reports have already resulted in a federal investigation being opened over official misconduct. Read all the features and watch the powerful videos Sue and her team have produced for the series here. Branford: "Sometimes your reporting has an impact that you don't actually realize...These reports that we're doing for Mongabay, we may discover such an impact...the Brazilian prosecutor is asking for compensation for this indigenous community, but there may also be other impacts that we only discover years later. "We journalists sometimes feel we just go on reporting and don't really change very much, but now and again you come up with cases where you very definitely have changed things, and it makes you feel like, OK, it really was worthwhile." We begin the show by talking about some of the latest top conservation news, from Hong Kong's amazingly resilient (and endangered) tree frogs to Norway's new financial commitment to stem deforestation around the world.

On this episode, we feature excerpts from a conversation with author and biologist E.O. Wilson, one of the greatest scientists of the last 100 years, who was recently interviewed by Mongabay senior correspondent Jeremy Hance about the Half Earth biodiversity initiative, the Trump Administration, and how he maintains hope for the future. We also welcome back Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Butler, who answers a listener question about the natural sounds heard in the background at the start of every episode of the Newscast (the image that illustrates this episode is from the spot where that recording was produced, in Indonesia).

This week we’re joined by Joel Berger, a professor at Colorado State University and a senior scientist with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, who recently wrote a commentary for Mongabay arguing that there are too many large mammals like yaks and Saiga antelope living in remote regions (so-called “edge species”) that are wrongfully overlooked by conservation initiatives. Then from Peru, Dr. Andrew Whitworth, a conservation and biodiversity scientist with the University of Glasgow, shares rare recordings he recently made in the field of a critically endangered bird called the Sira Curassow.

This being the last Mongabay Newscast of 2016, we’re bringing you the top new species discoveries of the year. Here at Mongabay we report on a lot of environmental science and conservation news. It’s not always the most cheery subject matter, especially when we’re reporting on endangered or extinct species. But it’s important to remember that we’re also discovering new species all the time. Mongabay staff writer Shreya Dasgupta rounded up all of the top new species discovered in 2016, including 13 new dancing peacock spiders, a crab that was discovered in a pet market, a new species of whale, a tarantula that shoots balls of barbed hair at its enemies, and one bird that is now 13 distinct species. We also speak with author Mike Shanahan, whose new book Gods, Wasps, and Stranglers: The secret history and redemptive future of fig trees looks at this tropical species’ biology and key ecological role, as well as its deep cultural (and spiritual) place in human history. If listening to this episode of the Newscast leaves you wanting to hear more from Shanahan, Mongabay editor Erik Hoffner interviewed him back in November. “Wild fig trees are magnets to biodiversity. Plant them and other species, both plant and animal, soon follow,” Shanahan said then.