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Off the coast of Mexico, National Geographic Explorer Bertie Gregory spots a lifeless creature dangling from a fishing line. With a bulging head that looks like it swallowed a gavel, there's no mistaking the animal: It’s a hammerhead shark. Gregory captured the heartbreaking footage while filming Hammerheads Up Close, premiering July 5 on Disney+ and Hulu and airing on National Geographic at 9/8c. In the show, the wildlife filmmaker scours the Pacific waters looking for hammerheads and examines why their numbers have plummeted in recent years.

Growth in understanding of ecological restoration necessitates updated guidance for effective, equitable, and outcome-oriented restoration across terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine ecosystems. The third edition of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration provides an expanded, evidence-based framework for ecological restoration aligned with the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and other global frameworks.

While biodiversity is being reshaped across the globe, extinction risk assessments are lacking for most species, and a major challenge remains in understanding whether global threat status aligns with local population trends. Here, we assess whether population temporal prevalence trends are consistent with a species’ global extinction risk, using over 60,000 populations of 2362 species across 978 marine and terrestrial assemblages (sampled for at least 20 years, mostly from temperate regions).

Protected areas are a critical component of efforts to reverse biodiversity loss by 2050. In the ocean, free-driftingfish aggregating devices (dFADs) are released in large numbers by industrial purse seine fishing companies tohelp catch tuna. These devices can enter marine protected areas (MPAs) undetected, potentially leading to wildlifeentanglement, plastic pollution, and habitat degradation. Here we investigate processes by which dFADs maycompromise MPA objectives and assess the burden they put on existing MPAs.

Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to increase global protected and conserved area coverage to at least 30% by 2030. The impact on people, whether positive or negative, will depend on the social context of additional areas and how they are governed and managed. Here, we show that Target 3 could affect large and socially diverse populations under different implementation scenarios. Nearly half the human population lives within 10 km of areas included in a scenario maximising biodiversity representation.

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing global interest in understanding and demonstrating the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) which collectively are referred to as protected and conserved areas (PCAs). The need to go beyond coverage targets and understand whether PCAs are delivering conservation outcomes was already recognized in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, which highlighted that PCAs must be “effectively and equitably managed” (CBD 2011).

The ocean is home to some of the richest biodiversity on Earth. From coral reefs and mangrove forests to the deep sea, marine ecosystems sustain countless species, support coastal communities, regulate the climate and underpin global food security.But these systems face growing pressure from overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change.

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This report was produced by the Adrienne Arsht Community-Based Resilience Solutions Initiative at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and authored by Dr. Vanessa Constant and Dr. Ana Spalding.

A landmark global study has identified more than 165,000 square kilometres of coral reefs across 71 countries with the strongest potential to survive a warming world – tripling previous estimates and offering a rare note of hope for one of the ocean’s most threatened ecosystems.

The reef manta ray (Mobula alfredi) is a highly mobile pelagic marine ray found throughout the tropical and subtropical waters of the Indo-Pacific, but investigation into their behavior and ecology within Papua New Guinea has not been previously undertaken. Furthermore, the home range, dispersal characteristics, and inter-seasonal fine-scale habitat use of this species is limited.