News

A study tracking 35 years of vegetation data from the Amazon to the Cerrado over seven presidencies shows how Brazil’s top political leadership can dramatically slow down or speed up the loss of tropical forests and savannas.'Brazil has shown the world that deforestation can be dramatically reduced when there is the political will to act. But that …

Dr Adriane Esquivel Muelbert, Head of Global Change Ecology at Cambridge, has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work on the impacts of global change on forest biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.Dr Esquivel Muelbert is one of 30 winners of the 2026 Philip Leverhulme Prize announced by the Leverhulme Trust today.Chosen fr…

The new Coastal Ecology and Conservation field course ran for the first time this September taking students to salt marshes, sand dunes, rivers and conservation sites in North Norfolk.The trip, jointly organised with the Department of Zoology, was an opportunity for students to hone their bird and plant identification skills, design their own exper…

A landmark study led by the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences and Centre for Global Wood Security formally defines the concept of global wood security and identifies the 20 greatest challenges to wood security in the 21st century.The authors urge the international community to elevate wood security alongside food, energy, and w…

Food in Senegal is mostly grown on small-scale, rain-dependent farms, leaving much of the population vulnerable to climate shocks, according to the World Food Programme. However, satellite crop-mapping technologies designed to monitor climate’s impact on farming are largely beyond the reach of the West African country.A new analysis of Senegalese c…

Nature conservation solely focussed on protecting threatened species and habitats is no longer sufficient.A new paper co-authored by Prof Lynn Dicks, leader of Zoology's Agroecology Group argues that protecting the functions and processes of whole ecosystems might better conserve their constituent parts.Published in Conservation Letters, the paper …

Researchers have analysed aerial laser scans of huge areas across the Cairngorms Connect partnership in the Scottish Highlands, to produce incredibly detailed maps showing millions of young trees have naturally established following an increase in deer culling.A University of Cambridge-led team has used aerial surveys across a huge swathe of the Ca…

To conserve species, we need to understand not only which species need action, but the effective actions they need.A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology has brought together two of the world's largest sources of conservation knowledge to assess, for the first time, whether the actions being taken for amphibians, birds and mamma…

The Conservation & Development Lab (CDL) has received an Innovations in Sustainability Practice Award at the National Sustainability Society in Denver, Colorado on 17 August.CDL has been recognised for its work to identify whether interventions to promote pro-environmental social norms can reduce deforestation while supporting cocoa and palm oil fa…

A rare conservation good news story is the subject of a paper co-authored by Prof Rhys Green, published in the journal Ibis. The study described examines the recovery of previously critically endangered vulture species in Nepal.Beginning in 1994, populations of three species of vultures endemic to South Asia began a catastrophic population decline.…

July marked an important milestone for our Department of Land Economy colleagues, as the MSt in Climate, Environmental and Urban Policy (CEUP) programme's inaugural 2024–26 cohort completed their final residential period and became the first students to complete the full cycle of residential teaching since the programme's launch. At the same time, …

A new study led by researchers at the University of Cambridge has produced the first large-scale, high-resolution map of how quickly tropical forests recover carbon and structure when simply left to regrow on former pastureland, using repeated airborne laser scans across Brazil's Atlantic Forest.Why it matters for carbon marketsThe Atlantic Forest …

Cambridge PhD researcher Yihang She built a fully synthetic forest inside a videogame engine to train AI systems to recognise individual trees from drone lidar scans, cutting the labelling work behind forest surveys to a fraction of what traditional methods require.A drone swoops low over an alpine forest. It climbs suddenly to follow the contours …

Cambridge researchers used Tessera, a geospatial foundation model, to map tree species across the mountainous Trentino region in Italy, outperforming traditional satellite methods and opening the door to low-cost, continent-scale forest mapping.Forests are increasingly under threat from drought, storms, disease and logging. Mapping tree species hel…

The impact of road deaths on hedgehog populations, particularly smaller groups, is shown in a new study published in the journal Animal Conversation. Researchers studied four hedgehog populations in Nottinghamshire and found that vehicles killed between 15% and 29% of individuals each year, making roadkill the leading recorded cause of death, accou…