Biodiversity

"Brendan Cummings doesn’t need to go far to find a dying signature of Southern California’s desert landscape: He stands on his porch and eyes whole forests of Joshua trees that haven’t produced seedlings in decades."

"In Iowa, researchers and farmers are discovering that planting strips of native prairie amidst farmland benefits soil, water, biodiversity, and more."

"The Trump administration Tuesday proposed allowing logging on more than half of Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in North America."

"Two-thirds of bird species in North America are at risk of extinction because of the climate crisis, according to a new report from researchers at the Audubon Society, a leading US conservation group."

"Each summer for the last two decades, Jim Parker has readied his small whale watch boat, and made a business out of ferrying tourists out into the cool blue waters of the Gulf of Maine. For years, it was steady work."

"Five decades ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the polluted Potomac River a “national disgrace.” Although it is now much cleaner, officials in Washington are still not convinced the water is safe for humans to swim in. But many miles downriver, where the Potomac widens to lakelike proportions as it flows toward the Chesapeake Bay, it teems with a different species of swimmers whose presence may signal healthier waters: dolphins."

"A small lizard found among the dunes straddling New Mexico and West Texas in one of the nation’s richest oil basins is at the center of a legal complaint filed Tuesday."

"The U.S. government is keeping details secret about a cattle grazing program in six Western states that could be harming habitat and endangered species, an environmental group says."

"Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the US Fish and Wildlife Service has links to powerful agricultural interests opposed to protections for endangered species she would oversee, the Guardian has learned."