EXPLORE WILD HOPE

It hasn’t been easy to convert the fishing community of Gujarat, India to be whale shark allies — but the message is finally breaking through.

To help India’s whale shark numbers recover, a program is now incentivizing fishermen to cut free the sharks from their nets — and offers to compensate the fishermen for the damages.

AI-enabled cameras are being deployed in a part of India that has the highest concentration of tigers on Earth. These trail cams don’t just take a photo of whatever passes by, but analyze it to identify whether it’s a tiger.

Dr. Hrishita Negi grew up watching wild tigers. Her father, Himmat, worked in tiger conservation for decades, contributing to India’s success in doubling its tiger population over the past 50 years.

In the northeastern part of India, the population of greater adjutant stork had declined to just 115 birds — until biologist Purnima Devi Barman launched a grassroots effort to do bring the species back from the brink.

To help protect an endangered stork, biologist Purnima Devi Barman provided looms and training to local women to create textiles and clothes that feature the bird.

The Pearl Islands were a paradise off the Pacific coast of Panama, until industrial fishing fleets threatened fish stocks and endangered wildlife there. Local residents have teamed up with biologist Callie Veelenturf to propose—and pass—a new national law that grants legal rights to nature itself.

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.

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.