EXPLORE WILD HOPE

About 21.5 million acres of the Western United States are nationally protected, and thousands are being managed or co-managed by Native American tribes reclaiming ancestral relationships with native plants and animals. It’s no surprise, then, that Wild Hope hit a rich vein of conservation stories grounded in the West. 

The Klamath River dam removal — the largest such project in U.S. history — is nearing completion. Soon, salmon will swim freely in the river and its tributaries for the first time in over a century.

Jaguars are top predators that need large spaces in which to live and hunt. In Belize, 35% of the land has been protected—but these areas are divided into two large clusters, connected by a crucial and dangerous bottleneck that the cats must navigate to survive.

Ray Cal is a wildlife ecologist and the manager of Runaway Creek Nature Reserve in central Belize. He is in charge of field operations and maintaining security, so that Runaway Creek continues to stay a model wildlife haven.

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.

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.

Stories of ecosystem recovery offer opportunities to celebrate the work of scientists, volunteers, and communities coming together to restore natural spaces. But sometimes, saving species calls for difficult choices. 

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, […]

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.

Removing dams from the Elwha River allows salmon to return upstream—and bring precious nutrients from the sea that eventually spread throughout the forest.