Green & indigenous News

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in collaboration with the University of the Virgin Islands have discovered that microorganisms in seawater surrounding corals provide a powerful indicator of coral disease, potentially transforming how reef health is monitored worldwide.

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Forensics experts gather DNA to understand who was present at a crime scene. But what if the crime occurred in the middle of a lake, where DNA could be carried far and wide by wind and waves? That's the challenge faced by aquatic ecologists who study environmental DNA (eDNA) to monitor endangered animals, track invasive species, or monitor fish populations.

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The Alaska Federation of Natives has launched an aggressive campaign to fight the Safari Club International's effort to weaken the influence of the federal government on subsistence management in Alaska and restore state authority over its regulation. AFN says only the federal government can defend Alaska's rural priority for subsistence, and the Safari Club proposal threatens those protections.

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Pharmaceuticals used in health care provide huge health and economic benefits to society, but are now found extensively as pollutants across global waterways.

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Solar panels on bodies of water in the northeastern U.S. might generate renewable energy but could also carry risks for birds, especially waterbirds. Now a new study provides a data-informed approach to siting floating solar that could protect waterbirds and others, without sacrificing the potential for energy generation.

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AFN says a Safari Club proposal puts Native subsistence rights at risk

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Japanese macaques, colloquially referred to as snow monkeys, famously soak in steaming hot springs during winter. It's easy to see that this helps them stay warm in cold temperatures, but a team of researchers at Kyoto University recently discovered that this iconic behavior does more than keep the monkeys warm.

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Sealed surfaces, artificial light and constant noise: What is part of everyday life for humans poses major challenges for other animals. A new international review conducted by researchers from Bielefeld University now reveals just how profoundly cities transform the social lives of animals. The study has been published in Biological Reviews.

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This story was originally published by MPR News.

Melissa Olson
MPR News

Two St. Paul hotels — The DoubleTree St. Paul Downtown and the Intercontinental St. Paul Riverfront — temporarily shuttered on Sunday.

Both properties are owned by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, a tribal nation in central Minnesota and is a part of the band’s portfolio of businesses, which includes Grand Casino Mille Lacs and Hinkley.

The Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures Board of Directors says they made the decision to “temporarily suspend” operations at the hotels “in response to elevated safety and security concerns.”

On Sunday morning, Jan. 18, guests at the downtown hotels received letters saying their reservations were cancelled.

“Due to heightened safety concerns in St. Paul, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily close our hotel, and your reservation will be cancelled effective Sunday, January 18th at 12 p.m.,” the letter read.

Combined, the two hotels account for more than 600 rooms.

St. Paul MayorKaohly Her said in a statement to MPR News that her office has been in contact with Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures, “to determine what support the city can provide.”

Added Her, “We support whatever steps they take to protect their workforce during this temporary closure.”

UNITE Here Local 17, the union that represents hospitality workers at both hotels, has not responded to a request for comment on the closures.

For more than a week, some members of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe have posted questions to social media about whether federal law enforcement, including ICE agents, were staying at the band’s hotels.

Virgil Wind, the Mille Lacs Band chief executive, posted a cell phone video last Monday on his personal social media page that said it was possible ICE agents were staying at the hotels.

“The answer is that we very well could be,” Wind said in the video.

Mille Lacs band tribal members protested outside the tribe’s government buildings on Friday. Tribal member Daphne Shabaiash was among those present at that protest.

“It wasn’t OK that we were doing it for financial gain,” Shabaiash said. “It was like a moral duty for me to speak on the issue. I felt like other people were kind of being hushed. I wasn’t willing to be hushed because it had affected me personally with family members of mine in the cities.”

Shabaiash, who describes herself as a person of “Native American and Mexican decent,” said members of her family who live in St. Paul have been negatively affected by ICE operations.

She praised the tribe’s decision to close the hotels.

“Housing those agents caused real harm and frustration within our communities, and many tribal and community members had to speak up forcefully to be heard.” Shabaiash said.

Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures and the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe refused interview requests.

The post Tribal-owned hotels temporarily shutter in St. Paul due to ‘safety’ concerns appeared first on ICT.

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To ensure our bodies function correctly, the cells that compose them must operate properly. Imagine a cell as a bustling city where tiny parts called organelles move, reorganize, and respond to external stresses. To understand how our bodies stay healthy, or what goes wrong during disease, scientists need a way to "peek" inside the cell and observe this movement in real-time.

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Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate "honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality."

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Last Updated on January 20, 2026 Residential schools were not a tragic misunderstanding, a well-intentioned social experiment, or an unfortunate footnote in an otherwise benevolent national story. They were a cornerstone of state policy that was designed to erase Indigenous peoples. Yet in recent years, a growing chorus of commentators, politicians, and online influencers have […]

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While ecotourism has contributed both to wildlife conservation and community welfare in Kenya, over-tourism and the corporatization of ecotourism are now proving to be literal impediments in the ecological webs of the Kenyan wilderness. A Maasai leader recently took legal action against luxury chain Ritz-Carlton, claiming that its new lodge in Kenta’s Maasai Mara Reserve obstructs a crucial wildebeest migration corridor.This article was originally published on Mongabay

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The Sahel, the semi-arid African region stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east, has become the epicenter of global terrorism, given the high number of attacks by armed groups and the resulting fatalities, including those suffered by civilians. This development is rooted in a complex interplay of factors. They include state fragility, illicit economies, limited presence of government in rural areas, and conflicts driven by resource scarcity due to climate shocks.

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During brain development, neurons extend long processes called axons. Axons link different areas of the brain and carry signals within it and to the rest of the body. Growing axons "wire up" the brain by following precise paths through the tissue. Their navigation depends on chemical signals and the physical properties of their surroundings.

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I grew up in rural Colorado, deep in the mountains, and I can still remember the first time I visited Denver in the early 2000s. The city sits on the plain, skyscrapers rising and buildings extending far into the distance. Except, as we drove out of the mountains, I could barely see the city—the entire plain was covered in a brown, hazy cloud.

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When U.S. forces entered Venezuela in December and removed President Nicolás Maduro, officials framed the intervention as a strategic economic opportunity. President Donald Trump repeatedly pointed to the country’s oil reserves and rare earth minerals, saying U.S. companies stood to earn billions of dollars. Less attention has been paid to the environmental risks of this plan. More than half of Venezuela is covered by forest, much of it in the Amazon Basin. It also has grasslands, wetlands and thousands of kilometers of Caribbean coastline. These ecosystems were already under strain under the Maduro government, but critics warn that foreign intervention could intensify the damage. “If environmental risks aren’t taken into account in this process, we’re probably facing a potential environmental catastrophe of a very large magnitude,” Eduardo Klein, a marine ecology professor at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, told Mongabay. Venezuela has an estimated 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the largest in the world. Yet it produces slightly less than a million barrels a day, far below many other oil-producing countries with smaller reserves. By international standards, Venezuela’s oil is heavier than in other parts of the world, making it more costly and requiring special processing equipment. (Venezuelan oil costs around $80 per barrel, compared to around $60/barrel in the U.S. and other parts of the world.) The government has also allowed pipelines and refineries to fall into disrepair over the last 20 years, the result of financial mismanagement, corruption, an untrained workforce and sanctions. In 2024,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Satellite imagery and artificial intelligence can detect with high accuracy two invasive weed species in Australia, posing a new opportunity for defense against these pervasive plants.

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Cities need clear limits and targets on urban sprawl to understand whether planning tools like greenbelts and denser development are working, according to new Concordia research. Applying such metrics in urban planning as rigorously as in other fields that work to limit environmental degradation is essential to achieving a sustainable future in the decades ahead, the study says.

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Many African conservation decisions such as funding, policy, species prioritization and nursery propagation implicitly treat the IUCN Red List as a complete map of extinction risk. It is not. For plants including trees, the biggest risk is not only that we mis-rank species, it’s that we overlook vast numbers of species that have never been globally assessed or have assessments that are decades old. So, how much plant diversity is assessed? Globally, one widely cited synthesis notes that of about 350,000 vascular plant species, the IUCN Red List documents about 62,666 species, or roughly 18%. That means most vascular plant species worldwide have no global Red List category to guide action. Africa illustrates the gap even more starkly. A comprehensive checklist of Mozambique’s vascular flora (compiled in July 2021) reported that although 1,667 taxa in the national checklist were registered on the IUCN Red List, the global extinction risk status for 76.5% of Mozambique’s vascular flora was not evaluated (including taxa explicitly categorized as not evaluated (NE) and taxa not listed on the IUCN Red List). At a broader (tropical Africa) scale, one peer-reviewed analysis of 22,036 green plant species found that only 2,856 had full IUCN assessments available (about 13%), and only 2,009 (9.1%) had assessments published after 2001. In other words, 87% of species had their assessments published a quarter century, or longer, ago. Flower and leaves of mngambo (Manilkara sansibarensis), a resilient East African tree known for its hard, termite-resistant wood and its small, sweet, edible fruit,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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In the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, in Brazil’s western Amazon, daily life still depends on the forest. Families tap rubber, collect Brazil nuts, and manage small plots without clearing large areas. The reserve is named after Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper and labor leader murdered in 1988 for defending that way of life. More than three decades later, the logic he argued for — that forests are better protected when people can make a living from them — has returned to the center of Brazilian conservation policy. That shift is taking place within ARPA, the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. Created in 2002 by the Brazilian government and later backed by WWF and major donors, ARPA supports 120 protected areas covering more than 60 million hectares (148 million acres), an expanse roughly the size of Madagascar. Its early years focused on expanding protected areas and building a long-term financing structure. The results were tangible. Between 2008 and 2020, deforestation in ARPA-supported areas was significantly lower than in comparable regions, avoiding large volumes of carbon emissions. A new phase, ARPA Comunidades, reflects a change in emphasis, contributor Constance Malleret wrote for Mongabay. About half of the protected areas under ARPA are sustainable-use reserves, where people live and work inside the forest. Until now, these communities benefited indirectly from conservation spending. The new program aims to support them directly. “We were missing closer attention to the communities living in these sustainable-use conservation units,” said Fernanda Marques of FUNBIO, the Brazilian nonprofit that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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A team of scientists has overcome a major challenge in predicting how Antarctic life will fare under future climate scenarios, revealing five scenarios for the future of Antarctic life.

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Artificial light at night extends pollen season and increases allergen exposure in Northeastern United States cities. Lin Meng and colleagues analyzed 12 years of pollen data from 12 monitoring stations across the Northeastern United States, combining measurements with satellite data on artificial light at night and climate records. The study is published in PNAS Nexus.

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Some time around 1683, amateur Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the plaque from between his teeth and peered at it through a home-made microscope.

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Researchers at the John Innes Center and the Earlham Institute are pioneering powerful single-cell visualization techniques that could unlock higher yields of global wheat.

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