“Typically, it takes seasons for a standard drought to develop — with a flash drought, however, expedited drying arises in just weeks. Thus, it’s quite difficult to prepare for them. However, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California may have a solution. At the end of April, they released a study about their discovery of a way to recognize signs months in advance of a flash drought event. Signs from space, that is. You just have to look for the glow — or, well, lack thereof. It would appear that, in anticipation of a flash drought, the ‘glow’ of a plant begins to dim, and it’s possible to capture such dimming with spacecraft orbiting our planet.

More specifically, this glow is not visible to the human eye, but rather can be identified by certain instruments aboard satellites like NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). According to scientists, the plant glow phenomenon had been recurring on this satellite’s data since 2014, when it arrived in space and began ‘seeing the light’ across the Midwest U.S. throughout the growing season.”

From Space.com.

“Spain and Portugal’s Iberian lynx population now stands at 2,000, a number that means the endangered species is gradually getting further away from the risk of extinction.

That’s according to the latest report from a working group covering the wild cat, and which is coordinated by Spain’s central Ministry for Environmental Transition. 

Population has been steadily rising since 2015, which is prompting optimism among experts that the extinction risk for the species could soon be drastically reduced. 

Around 20 years ago, there were fewer than 100 catalogued specimens, compared to more than 2,000 in 2023.”

From The Olive Press.

“In a laboratory in the University of Melbourne earlier this year, PhD student Pierre Ibri was running an experiment that could prove to be a critical step in an audacious plan to save Australia’s endangered northern quoll.

In plastic trays were groups of tissue cells of another Australian marsupial – the common and mouse-like fat-tailed dunnart – that he was subjecting to the toxin of the cane toad, an invasive amphibian that has cut a swathe through populations of native animals in Australia’s north.

Except some of these cells were different.

They had been genetically tweaked by a team of scientists at the University of Melbourne and Colossal Biosciences to have the same resistance to the toad’s bufotoxin that other mammals elsewhere in the world have managed to develop over millions of years of evolution.”

From The Guardian.

“India’s forest cover saw a consistent increase over the last 15 years, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) said at the recently concluded United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) in the US.

An Indian delegation, led by Jitendra Kumar, Director General of Forests and Special Secretary, MoEFCC, participated in the 19th Session of the UNFF, held at the UN Headquarters in New York from May 6 to May 10.

The delegation apprised the UNFF that the consistent increase in forest cover was due to the ‘country’s significant advancements in forest conservation and sustainable forest management,’ MoEFCC said on Sunday.

‘Globally, India ranks third in the net gain, in average annual forest area, between 2010 and 2020,’ it added.”

From The Weather Channel.