In the mountain villages of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, farmers are combining ancient Maya knowledge with modern sustainable farming techniques to protect their crops from pests and disease. Smallholders are creating homemade biopesticides using plants with strong smells and flavors to deter pests on their family plots. This is helping to cut back on the use of increasingly expensive agrochemicals, many of which have been labeled as dangerous to human health and linked to soil degradation. About 60 Guatemalan communities in the Western Highland departments of Sololá and Huehuetenango, as well as Chiquimula in the east, are working to revive these traditional techniques with support from the international development organization World Neighbors. Their focus is to restore and strengthen traditional knowledge, combining it with agroecological practices that help families produce surplus food they can sell to boost household incomes. “Traditional farming techniques are becoming popular because they are simple practices to apply, use local resources, and have proven to be effective,” Dayani Roche, a program associate at World Neighbors, told Mongabay via email. Rather than a single ancient recipe, farmers are using “a living combination of ancestral knowledge, local experimentation and more recent agroecological practices,” he said, which are “safer for families, soil, water and biodiversity than many chemical alternatives.” The Maya civilization, which once stretched across modern-day Central America, had a rich history of farming dating back to 2000 B.C.E. Its most celebrated agriculture system is the milpa, a form of intercropping that involves a mix of maize, beans and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014. “The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN. ‘The Heaven Sword’, Taiwan’s tallest tree, measures 84.1 meters. Photo courtesy of Steven Pearce. Taiwan is one of the few places on Earth where trees can grow this tall. The island sits where the tropics meet the subtropics, and its mountains host several giant conifer species. The species behind the new record, Taiwania cryptomerioides, is known to the Indigenous Rukai people as “the tree that hits the moon.” Although nearly 60% of Taiwan is covered in forest, loggers cleared much of the island’s old-growth forest between 1912 and 1991. However, its steep slopes were too dangerous to reach, and pockets of ancient forest survived. Still, finding the tallest tree amid the rugged terrain was a task. Taiwan…This article was originally published on Mongabay

PORT HUGHES, Australia — Situated midway along the Great Southern Reef that spans Australia’s southern coastline, the waters off Port Hughes typically teem with life. The coastal hamlet northwest of Adelaide plays host to a multitude of coral, bivalve and fish species. But in late March, the largest and longest harmful algal bloom (HAB) in Australian history arrived to Port Hughes, depleting its waters’ rich biodiversity. The bloom had first appeared elsewhere off the state of South Australia’s coast a year earlier, causing eye and skin irritation and respiratory symptoms among beachgoers. Then, along with waves of acrid-smelling sea foam, scores of dead marine animals began washing ashore. In Port Hughes, the HAB’s impacts were most visible below the surface. The town’s wooden jetty had previously been one of the most consistent locations in South Australia to observe temperate species, said Stefan Andrews, co-founder of the Great Southern Reef Foundation, a conservation advocacy group. But by mid-April, when Mongabay joined Andrews on a dive, the site was drab compared with vibrant photographs taken in February and March. Under the jetty, sponges and corals that had previously adorned its pylons in a brilliantly hued mosaic appeared colorless. Apart from a short-headed seahorse (Hippocampus breviceps) — a “sign of hope,” Andrews called it — little life was visible in the murky waters. The reef, he said, had become quieter, lacking the sounds of snapping shrimp and other creatures that once played in the underwater soundtrack. “There’s a sense of loss when you…This article was originally published on Mongabay

As the U.S. prepares for an extravagant celebration of its founding principles, fewer Americans see their country as exceptional, a new poll finds.

BANGKOK — More than 600 residents of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces embarked May 31 on a roughly 68-kilometer, six-day ‘peace walk’ to demand the Thai government take action on the river pollution crisis that has seen Thai rivers polluted with heavy metals. The ensemble of affected residents, civil society groups, monks and students marched from Tha Ton subdistrict in Chiang Mai to the city of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, reaching their destination on June 5, World Environment Day. For more than a year, Thailand’s Pollution Control Department has reported dangerous levels of arsenic, mercury, cadmium and other heavy metals in rivers across northern Thailand, with mining operations across eastern Myanmar suspected to be responsible for the pollution. “We are walking because our rivers are slowly dying,” Pianporn Deetes, executive director of the Rivers and Rights Foundation, which helped to organize the peace walk, told Mongabay by phone. “Toxic contamination from unregulated mining upstream is already affecting water, fish, food, livelihoods, and public health. We do not want to wait until more people become sick. This is an emergency.” Pianporn said the walk (42 miles) was about taking collective action to share information, document impacts and build public pressure in a bid to force the government to address the issue, which Pianporn said has, so far, been lacking. “Monitoring has improved, but action has not matched the scale of the crisis,” she said. “We need urgent diplomatic engagement with neighboring countries, stronger health monitoring, transparency, and action to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

As offshore wind farms expand rapidly in the global renewable energy transition, scientists are studying how these large marine infrastructure projects affect ecosystems beneath the waves. Research from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands suggests that offshore wind may bring both risks and benefits for sharks and rays, known collectively as Elasmobranchii, which are highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields (EMFs). A six-year project called “Elasmopower” examined how EMFs from subsea power cables in offshore wind farms affect bottom-dwelling sharks and rays. These species depend on natural electric and magnetic fields for key behaviors such as navigation, prey detection, habitat use and long-distance movement, particularly in low-visibility environments. The studies conducted as part of the Elasmopower project have been published in four papers, with three additional papers currently undergoing peer review. Sharks and rays have specialized electroreceptors called ampullae of Lorenzini. The jelly-filled sensory canals around the head and snout can detect even extremely weak EMFs from prey and predators, water movement, and the Earth’s geomagnetic field, Erwin Winter, a scientist at Wageningen, told Mongabay. This system is central to hunting and orientation, making Elasmobranchii especially relevant for studying EMF exposure from offshore energy infrastructure, Winter added. Erwin Winter, a researcher with the Elasmopower project, presented findings on offshore wind, electromagnetic fields and bottom-dwelling sharks and rays at the Sharks International 2026 conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in May. Image by Malaka Rodrigo for Mongabay. During a presentation on a summary of the Elasmopower research at the Sharks International 2026…This article was originally published on Mongabay