There have been few sightings of the endangered Persian leopard in the Caucasus region over the past 20 years: just three in Georgia and 10 in Armenia. But scientists and conservationists are alert to one Persian leopard in particular, whom they’ve named Aren and who is presumed to have journeyed 240 kilometers (150 miles) through cold, mountainous terrain with only three legs. This region of the world — made up of southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan — still contains decades-old minefields from prior conflicts, and it’s believed this is how Aren was injured. Joining the Newscast this week to discuss her story for Mongabay is journalist Kayleigh Long, who explains how this leopard subspecies, Panthera pardus tulliana, persists in the region. She also describes how NGOs like NACRES, operating on extremely thin budgets, continue to monitor the big cats and provide what protection they can. “WWF is also monitoring the leopards. They put some cameras out in the same area as NACRES. So it’s really difficult,” she says. “I mean, these guys … are doing things on an absolute skeleton crew. And that’s partly because of a lack of funding more generally. There’s been a kind of tightening of purse strings around the world.” NACRES, founded in Georgia in 1991 as the Noah’s Ark Centre for the Recovery of Endangered Species and later renamed the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation & Research, has a staff of just three people, led by a zoologist named Bejan Lortkipanidze, who accompanied Long in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Samantha Murray, CEO of the Indigenous Desert Alliance, joins the program to discuss the IDA’s recent nomination for an Earthshot Prize. The alliance is a network of 70 ranger teams across the Australian desert, covering 270 million hectares (667 million acres), an area almost as large as Argentina. This makes it the largest Indigenous-led conservation corridor on the planet. Murray and her network of 885 rangers have helped restore biodiversity to 140 million hectares (346 million acres) of land over the past four years using the practice of cultural burning, a cultural and ecological management practice that has been present in Aboriginal culture for millennia. The IDA administers this through its “Right Way Desert Fire” program. Murray discusses the various ways in which this cultural knowledge is shared among ranger teams and the IDA via the guidance of Traditional Owners, the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islands individuals with ancestral, physical, or spiritual ties to the land. Traditional Owners may accompany rangers to what’s known as Country — the Indigenous concept of a holistic, living entity encompassing the physical land, waters, skies, and all living things — and direct where and how to burn, in part because the knowledge is passed down through oral storytelling. “We don’t get handed down a manual or a handbook on how to do [the] right way of burning all that knowledge,” Murray says. “And so we are very much [following] an oral history and showing practically what to do.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The global pet trade, particularly in exotic reptiles and amphibians, poses significant biodiversity and potential human health risks, scientists say; yet compared to other pressing crises like climate change, the solutions are relatively simple — if only governments would act on them. Susan Lieberman, vice president for international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in the U.S., and Sandra Altherr, co-founder and head of science at Pro Wildlife, in Germany, join the Mongabay Newscast this week to discuss these solutions, which they’ve outlined in a commentary published in the journal Nature. “The international wildlife trade for pets, reptiles, amphibians, and other species is a massive experiment,” Lieberman says. “It’s an experiment to see what diseases can come from one part of the world into another part of the world, and ‘let’s see what happens.’ I think it’s an experiment we should not be undertaking.” But the “exotic pet trade could be regulated very quickly, and this risk could be reduced very quickly,” Altherr adds. Both guests discuss what they identify as the main legal gaps that world governments could close, such as the fact that countries of origin have no or little legal recourse for species sold outside their borders. Another gap is that the CITES, the global convention on the wildlife trade, is often poor at taking a proactive approach to protect species before they become threatened, the authors argue. And species being pushed toward the brink of extinction don’t have the luxury of time for the long…This article was originally published on Mongabay