Along the Pacific coastlines of North America, the northern elephant seal is now a common sight — but at one point it was so rare that the species was officially (and wrongfully) declared extinct. Today the large seal’s current population stands at 160,000 and growing, but in the 19th century it was critically overhunted for its oil-rich blubber. If it weren’t for the decreasing demand for blubber-based fuel and subsequent policies enacted to protect the species, the northern elephant seal might not swim in our waters today.
Explore more stories from the full Conservation Comeback series now.
With just a few changes, you can transform your yard or balcony from a wildlife desert into a wildlife sanctuary. And, if you convince your neighbors to do the same, you could even make your neighborhood into a habitat corridor for wildlife!
Just like humans, wild animals often need to cross busy roads as they roam. But unlike us, they can’t rely on stoplights and crosswalks. That’s where wildlife crossings come in.
Fernanda Abra is a biologist with a Ph.D. in Applied Ecology and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation and Sustainability Center.
Wildlife corridors are an invaluable conservation tool. These ribbons of habitat connect landscapes fragmented by human development or roadways, giving animals the ability to roam in search of food, water, and mates.
The Brazilian treetops are full of creatures like monkeys and sloths living high above a forest floor segmented by dangerous roadways. The Via Fauna team is installing arboreal crossings made of cheap, local materials to reconnect the forest canopy — and allow these creatures to once again move freely throughout their landscape.
Brazil has more biodiversity than any other nation on Earth, but it also has more than a million miles of roads. Biologist Fernanda Alba and her team are establishing underpasses across the country that allow big terrestrial animals — to date, the team has documented over 40,000 safe wildlife crossings.
Upcoming: Episode 24: Protecting Paradise
Marine biologist Callie Veenlenturf came to the Pearl Islands to study sea turtles, but soon helped spark passage of remarkable laws that grant legal rights to nature and the turtles themselves.
Upcoming: Episode 23: Jaguar Passage
More than 35% of land in Belize is protected, and that’s been good for jaguars that live in these refuges — but for populations to thrive, the cats need to move from one safe area in the north to another in the south across a landscape of farms and towns. Local conservationists are learning where the cats go and buying the land they rely on to create a wild corridor that can finally give the cats safe passage.
In order to scale up reforestation, Mauricio Ruiz and his organization ITPA have partnered with the drone fleet at MORFO. Each drone can plant up to 50 hectares of forest per day, which is 50 times faster than planting by hand.
In the past 40 years, golden lion tamarins became a symbol of conservation success when 150 zoos worldwide assisted a breeding and reintroduction program that brought their numbers in the wild from 200 to over 3700. Then, yellow fever jumped from humans to the primates and began to decimate their population—taking a third of the population in just two years.
Golden lion tamarins live only in small fragments of the Atlantic Forest. In 2021, an outbreak of yellow fever took nearly one third of the already endangered population, but teams were able to modify a vaccine for humans to help immunize the population against future outbreaks.
Golden lion tamarins were nearly wiped out in the 1970s, but worldwide efforts by 150 zoos helped bring the species back from near-extinction. Today, local conservationists are expanding the forests in Brazil, and the wild population has grown from under 200 to now over 4800 tamarins!
Conservationists are hard at work protecting golden lion tamarins and other wildlife from extinction, and now you can help them from the comfort of your own home.
Andreia started working with the conservation of the golden lion tamarin in 1983 as a volunteer in environmental education actions. In 1984, she became part of the golden lion tamarin reintroduction team. She is currently the coordinator of the field management of golden lion tamarins.
Marcos da Silve Freire has more than 30 years of experience in microbiology, with an emphasis on vaccinology. He is responsible for developing the yellow fever vaccine for golden lion tamarins.
Luís is a geographer who graduated from São Paulo University in 1987. He began his career working for natural areas protected by heritage in São Paulo, especially Serra do Mar.
Deep in the Panamanian forest, researchers are looking for “lost frogs” — species believed to have gone extinct, but that may be holding on in the wild.
In the heart of Panama, scientists have created an artificial rainforest to protect endangered frogs from the worst wildlife disease ever recorded.
Harlequin frogs (also called harlequin toads) are a group of beautiful, brightly-colored toads found in Central and South America. One species in particular, the Panamanian golden frog, is considered the national animal of Panama and a flagship species for amphibian conservation.
Dr. Gina Della Togna is the Executive Director of the Amphibian Survival Alliance and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Brian Gratwicke is a conservation biologist who leads the amphibian conservation programs at Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Smack-dab in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, stands the world’s largest urban rainforest…and it needs our help. To combat a century of deforestation and hunting, a team of researchers are repairing the forest’s forgotten web of life, one species at a time.
Plants can’t move on their own, so they usually need a little help to spread their seeds far and wide. Animals that scatter these seeds — often by eating the fruit and pooping out the remains — are known as seed dispersers.
Alexandra Pires is currently an associate professor at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, where she teaches the subjects of Natural Resources Conservation and Fauna Management.
Marcelo Rheingantz is a biologist at the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Executive Director of Refauna. He has dedicated his research career to the ecology and conservation of vertebrate populations in Brazil and South America.
In 2010, Fernando launched the concept of refaunation, and from then on coordinated the Refauna project, which reintroduced populations of agoutis, howler monkeys and tortoises in the Tijuca National Park, in Rio de Janeiro.
To restore the park to its former glory, researchers knew which animals needed to be reintroduced: monkeys, rodents, tortoises, and even dung beetles all played crucial roles in keeping the forest healthy.
Agoutis are large, adorable rodents found in Central and South America – and they’re critical players in keeping forest ecosystems healthy.
Brazil is a trove of biodiversity — habitats like the Atlantic Rainforest, urban forests like Tijuca National Park, and more coastlines, rainforests, and rivers that are rich with endemic plants and wildlife.
Over 50 species of honeycreeper once lived in Hawai’i, but now only 17 species remain after battling against invasive species and habitat loss. Today, even those survivors are threatened further by avian malaria. To stop the disease, conservationists use innovative techniques to suppress the population of the invasive mosquitoes that spread it.
Millions of years ago, a single rosefinch species arrived on the Hawai’ian islands and evolved into over 50 species of honeycreepers — a phenomenon known as adaptive radiation.
Hawai’i is home to a broad, beautiful array of birds species found only on its islands—like the stunningly diverse honeycreepers, many on the border of extinction. Now, a local team is removing invasive predators, restoring habitats, and battling mosquito-borne diseases to protect honeycreepers from their latest threat: avian malaria.
In addition to the impact of avian malaria, Hawai’i’s endangered honeycreepers are threatened by habitat loss and invasive predators — two problems that harm native bird populations everywhere, likely in your own back yard. Whether you’re looking to help Hawai’i’s birds, or if you’re hoping to make a difference to protect birds locally, the solutions […]
New tracking technologies are uncovering the flight paths of endangered shorebirds — and the obstacles they face along the way.
The endangered wedge-tailed shearwater — also known as the ‘ua‘u kani — was in critical danger after many nesting sites in Hawaii were overrun by predators like weasels, rags, or feral cats. Fortunately for the birds, locals banded together to protect nesting sites and the local population went from just 30 nesting birds to more than 3000!
A group in Maui has restored a safe haven for endangered seabirds to come home and nest: it’s completely fenced-off from predators and restored with native plants, but the birds still need some convincing! The team is using decoy “neighbors” and audio recordings of bird calls to make the seabirds feel at home — and at long last, the colony is growing!
All around the world, seabirds provide a critical link between land and sea. On Hawai’i, ecologists are working to protect two vital shearwater species that helped life first take hold on these islands.
Jay Penniman has worked as an independent contractor doing forestry, wildlife, and vegetation surveys, management, and assessment. Since 2006, he has worked for the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit of the University of Hawaii managing the Maui Nui Seabird Recovery Project.
Jenni Learned is a broad-spectrum ecologist on the Maui Nui Seabird team with experience working across diverse environments.
A common conservation technique on islands is the creation of predator-free zones to exclude invasive species, from mice to feral pigs, from recovering habitats.
The bald eagle has been a national symbol of the United States since 1782 — but not that long ago, this iconic species was on the verge of a complete extinction.
Researchers are trumpeting a welcome piece of news for African elephants. In the last 25 years, populations in southern Africa have reversed their declines, and even started to grow, according to a new study in Science Advances.
Coral reefs around the world are threatened by rising ocean temperatures, but hope is growing off the coast of Hawaii. There, researchers at the Coral Resilience Lab selectively breed corals to withstand ever-increasing amounts of heat stress.
This community in Hawaii is rallying together to study and protect local corals. Students, volunteers, and scientists work to collect and categorize fragments broken off from the reef, which then become candidates to breed before the new coral is reintroduced back into the ocean.
Corals are vital to ocean health, but they’re susceptible to rising water temperatures and can “bleach” under too much heat stress. Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab is breeding corals that are resilient to these hotter ocean temperatures – then they populate reefs with new corals that can finally beat the heat.
Coral reef bleaching stands apart as a crisis with innovative, long-term solutions.
Kira Hughes is the Managing Director of the Coral Resilience Lab at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology. This includes conducting research, grant writing and administration, engaging stakeholders, establishing and maintaining partnerships, and communicating science.
Madeleine Sherman is the Project Manager for the Coral Resilience Lab at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, and manager of the Lab's outreach and education programs.
Corals are known for their vibrant hues, but when they get stressed, they turn a ghostly white in a process known as coral bleaching. To appreciate why this happens, you need to understand the unique relationship that forms the basis of coral reefs.
Since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, it has become one of the most powerful tools to fight extinction in the United States.
The California condor is a North American wildlife icon — the continent's largest land birds and one of nature's most industrious scavengers — and also one of our most critically endangered avian species.
Our relationship with gray wolves is a complicated one, spanning centuries of tension and dating back to the beginning in the 1600s with North American colonization.
The recovery of the American Alligator is considered one of the biggest success stories of an endangered species – ever.
Florida manatees are in dire straits, having lost much of their available habitat and food sources in recent decades. Thanks to the work of Zoo Tampa and other researchers, the population is finally able to recover and return to the rivers they once called home.
Florida’s Crystal River used to be a rich seagrass ecosystem: a perfect source of food for the many manatees that once thrived there, before an invasive algae overtook the riverbed. Now, efforts to restore the habitat are underway – and they’re working!
When an invasive algae in Crystal River wiped out the eel grass that manatees need for food, the community rallies to restore the river and save the animals that call it home.
Lisa Moore, a fourth-generation Floridian, is an entrepreneur and philanthropist dedicated to the efforts to preserve, protect, and restore environmental resources.
Jessica Maillez is the Senior Environmental Manager at Sea and Shoreline. She has designed, permitted, and managed multiple large scale restoration projects along Florida’s coastline.
The United Kingdom and Ireland might not seem like the wildest places on Earth, but a growing popular movement here, known as rewilding, seeks to reverse millennia of environmental degradation.
Derek Gow has turned his farm into a breeding center to help rewild all of Britain. He’s raising rare white storks, native harvest mice, water voles that can help restore wetlands throughout the country.
Derek Gow has helped bring beavers back to Britain, and their impact on local landscapes and biodiversity has been immense. Now, he’s scaling up a breeding program to export another wetland engineer—the water vole—all across the country.
For years, Derek Gow worked his 400-acres in western England as a conventional sheep and cattle farm. Now, he’s using his experience with British rewilding projects to return his land to what it once was: a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem.
Ecologists from Mexico’s National Autonomous university relaunch a fundraising campaign to bolster conservation efforts for axolotls, an iconic, endangered fish-like type of salamander.
Pete Cooper is a wilding ecologist at the Derek Gow Consultancy, where he works on a variety of species reintroduction and rewilding projects. He leads a project trialing the captive breeding and reintroduction of glowworms, as well as working closely on reintroduction projects for other species including the harvest mouse, wildcat and turtle dove.
Derek Gow is a farmer, nature conservationist, and the author of Bringing Back the Beaver. He lives on a 300-acre farm on the Devon/Cornwall border, which he is in the process of rewilding. Derek has played a significant role in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole and the white stork in England.
Often the first and most effective strategy to healing a landscape is to pay attention to how ancestral wildlife, like native plants and animals, once shaped and strengthened these natural spaces.
Just as they have for millions of years, sea turtles by the thousands make their labored crawl from the ocean to U.S. beaches to lay their eggs. This year, record nesting was found in Florida and elsewhere despite growing concern about threats from climate change.
Leatherback turtles never stop swimming! This Florida lab uses tiny tethers so young hatchlings can swim constantly but avoid bumping into the wall of the tank. When they’re old enough, the young turtles are fitted with satellite trackers and released into the wild.
Beaches across Florida are a key habitat for nesting sea turtles. To keep hatchlings safe, teams patrol the beach at dawn to look for turtle tracks, safeguard nests, and even help those left behind make their way to the sea.
Sea turtles nesting in southeast Florida face a range of manmade threats — and for leatherbacks, researchers still know very little about the species and how to protect them. In the battle to save leatherback sea turtles, knowledge is key.
David Anderson is the Sea Turtle Conservation Coordinator at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. He supervises the collection of sea turtle nesting data along Boca Raton’s five miles of beach.
Dr. Jeanette Wyneken is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), located on the southeastern coast of Florida. She has more than 40 years of experience studying the biology, conservation, and health of sea turtles.
Whether becoming a citizen scientist, or simply a vocal ally for sea turtle protection, there are easy opportunities for anyone to get involved in saving some of our favorite ocean-bound creatures.
In 2021, an Oregon farmer decided to convert his 400-acre farm back to the wetland habitat. Now, just two year later, the new wetland supports migrating waterbirds and endangered fish.
Indigo snakes prey on other snakes—even venomous ones—but are still docile-enough to be handled by young children. Now, a one-of-a kind breeding program is raising these gentle giants and returning them to forests across the southeastern US.
Gopher tortoises create deep burrows that give critical shelter to over 350 species of insects, mammals, birds, and amphibians throughout the southeastern US. Their blood may be cold, but their heart is all warm inside!
In the face of extreme habitat loss, wildlife biologist Dr. Chris Jenkins puts an ambitious plan in motion to save two uniquely American reptiles — the eastern indigo snake and the gopher tortoise — and the longleaf pine forest they call home.
Dr. James Bogan is the Director for the Central Florida Zoo’s Orianne Center for Indigo Conservation, the only facility that breeds the eastern indigo snake for the sole purpose of reintroducing the offspring into regions where the population is believed to be locally extinct.
Christopher Jenkins has worked with Wildlife Conservation Society, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His current projects include land protection in longleaf pine ecosystems, ecology and conservation of timber rattlesnakes and the conservation of giant tortoises.
Reptiles are in need of support from conservationists and nature-lovers worldwide. Learn how to create more reptile-friendly environments and help build a stronger ecosystem for all types of critters near you.
After decades of fighting to regain ownership of their ancestral lands, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe marked this year’s Indigenous People’s Day with the purchase of 1,080 acres of land along the McCloud River in northern California.
When beavers were hunted to extinction in England some 400 years ago, the wetlands they maintained largely vanished. Now, as part of Britain’s broader rewilding mission, conservationists are returning beavers to the landscape—and boosting biodiversity in the process.
Prince William got a first-hand look at the waters of New York City on Monday on a visit to an oyster reef restoration project, after arriving in the United States for an environmental summit connected to a global competition for solutions to climate change challenges.
The sex of baby sea turtles is determined by the warmth of their nest, so conservationists in Australia are protecting hatchlings on the mainland (where dark sand means warm temps and more females) from threats—and help ensure more future mammas make it to the sea.
Dogs in Australia are sniffing out koala dung to help cities like Brisbane know where to put highway overpasses and reconnect isolated populations of the adorable marsupials.
Dogs are often thought of as humans’ best friends. But in Australia, they’re partnering with people to save other species from grave threats to the island continent’s unique fauna. In Brisbane, dogs are sniffing out koala scat (and the animals who expel it) in habitats fragmented by wildfires and urbanization. Pinpointing the marsupials’ whereabouts allows […]
Dr. Colin “Col” Limpus is chief scientist and a leading researcher for the Threatened Species Unit in the Queensland government’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.
Rob Geary is an experienced sea ranger with over 10 years of working in natural resource management and undertaking projects to protect and conserve threatened species and their habitats. He enjoys fieldwork and has extensive experience with feral animal management to protect marine turtle clutches and hatchlings from predation. He has undertaken numerous fauna surveys, […]
A century ago, the longleaf pine forests of the southeastern United States were flooded with birdsong—and the musical hammering of millions of red-cockaded woodpeckers. But by 1995, deforestation had caused woodpecker numbers to plummet to 4000 breeding groups.
Biologists in Mexico are learning how to save endangered salamanders by partnering with unusual allies: a group of nuns.
Axolotls can regenerate entire limbs, eyes and even their brains—and make a great “second date love” for one scientist.
The axolotl has been called a “conservation paradox” — a creature that is ubiquitous in pet stores, science labs and pop culture… yet almost extinct in the wild.
The axolotl is a type of salamander native to the canals and lakes around Mexico City, characterized by its flamboyant, feathery external gills.
Carlos Uriel Sumano Arias is a researcher with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Luis Zambrano was born in Tampico, Mexico, and earned a degree in biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He obtained his doctorate in ecology at UNAM, studying the effects of carp on benthic communities in experimental ponds. Zambrano’s research specialities are aquatic ecology and restoration. A founding member of the Mexican Society […]
NASA satellite imagery has recently been able to show that beavers banished to rural Idaho have made significant improvements to waterways in the region.
Removing dams from the Elwha River allows salmon to return upstream—and bring precious nutrients from the sea that eventually spread throughout the forest.
For decades, the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe fought to remove unwelcome dams on their river—and finally won.
A century-long campaign to take down the Elwha River dams climaxed in 2011with the largest dam removal project in history. Now, a decade later, Native American scientists and colleagues are chronicling an inspiring story of ecological rebirth.
From the revitalization of riverbeds to the genetic diversity of top predators, Kim Sager-Fradkin is tracking an ecological resurrection in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
Inspired by the success of the Elwha dam removal model, conservation advocates are building diverse coalitions to pursue additional salmon recovery projects across the Pacific Northwest region.
Young environmental activists scored what experts described as a ground-breaking legal victory when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development.
The red-cockaded woodpecker is only found in America's dwindling longleaf pine forests, where they create tree cavities that provide homes for other birds and small mammals.
People are setting fire to pine forests in North Carolina to help protect an endangered woodpecker, and many other creatures as well.
On an army base in North Carolina, soldiers and scientists have turned their conflict over an endangered species into collaboration—and conservation success.
One of the most inspiring conservation stories in American history is playing out on, of all places, a live-fire training ground at an Army base in North Carolina. There, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker has been given a new lease on life.
The lodges and wetlands that beavers build aren’t just places for their families to live and sleep (and snore!) — they’re havens where many wild creatures can thrive.
Beavers are back in England for the first time in 400 years, and their dams are already protecting villages from flood and helping farmers in times of drought.
Eurasian beavers were driven extinct in Britain centuries ago. But now these preeminent ecosystem engineers are back—charming many Britons, perturbing others, and all the while stimulating a healthy debate about whether the island nation is ready to embrace a wilder future.
Animals that transform their surroundings — "ecosystem engineers” — build, dig, and even poop new environments into existence, creating homes for themselves and others.
From the Associated Press: The largest dam removal project in United States history is underway, but in some ways, removing the dams is the easy part.
Beavers are a wonder to behold. They are ecosystem engineers–able to modify their habitats and change landscapes in ways that cultivate biodiversity and create wetlands. That ability makes them keystone species–they have an outsize influence on their ecosystems and the species they live with. But as a species, they also need help and protection, as […]
Oysters posses an amazing ability to filter water. They naturally filter and clean the water they live in, which makes an ongoing effort to put a billion of them in New York Harbor a pretty big deal.
Landscape architect Kate Orff is working with nature to protect New York City from future threats like rising seas and superstorms.
A taste for waste turns these creatures into pollution-fighting machines.
Rehabilitating oyster reefs can restore the balance of entire water ecosystems. Learn how to get involved today!
The Billion Oyster Project and Living Breakwaters are turning to nature for solutions to human-caused problems, and reviving the city’s relationship with the wild.
While New York Harbor is characterized mostly today by its neighboring industry and commercial traffic, before the impact of humans the waters were a biodiversity hotspot.
