SHENKENG, Taiwan — Ten kilometers east of Taipei’s high-rises and dense traffic, the city gives way to a succession of steep, forested ridgelines sheltering villages in the valleys below. The subtropical mist that cloaks these slopes at dawn has already thinned, and by 9 a.m. the heat is climbing. Li Chao-shiang, an assistant professor in the Department of Interior Design at China University of Technology in Taipei, winds upward on a narrow stone path, pausing to wipe his brow. Rounding a bend, he stops at an opening in the brush. Half the hillside before him is covered in dark-green ribbons, the regular corduroy of cultivated land. The other half looks like something took a bite out of it. “This jungle has a secret,” Li says. “If you look closely at the hills all around us, you can still make out faint lines that run through the forest. It may not be much to look at now, but what you are seeing are stone terraces — the remnants of one of the world’s great empires of tea.” For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tea made these hills valuable. By 1897, tea accounted for 22% of Taiwan’s export earnings, four times the value of sugar, with 96% of the island’s Formosa oolong sailing for New York and Chicago. Shenkeng’s own signature style, the lightly oxidized Wenshan pouchong, came on the scene around 1912 and was refined through the 1920s, becoming Taiwan’s leading export to Southeast Asia. “The soil,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

HONG KONG — “Spiderman … Tom Holland,” two secondary school boys repeated to each other as they watched conservationist Harry Wong nimbly climb a tall tree at their school, St. Louis School, in downtown Hong Kong. On a humid September afternoon, Wong installed a nest box for yellow-crested cockatoos (Cacatua sulphurea) on a candlenut tree (Aleurites moluccanus). Equipped with a harness and ropes, he climbed up the tree, installed the box, and quickly rappelled down. Wong and Astrid Andersson, a biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), are the dynamic duo behind HK Cockatoo Watch, a conservation project that seeks to protect the city’s feral yellow-crested cockatoos. Arborist and conservationist Harry Wong installs a nest box for yellow-crested cockatoos on a tree at St. Louis School in Hong Kong on Sept. 7, 2026. Image by Yenni Kwok/Mongabay. Yellow-crested cockatoos are considered to be critically endangered, with fewer than 2,000 individuals remaining in their native range in eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste. However, few people know that Hong Kong is home to the largest wild population of the species outside the two Southeast Asian countries. There are roughly 200 cockatoos in the city, or about 10% of the global wild population, believed to be descendants of released or escaped pets. The number is stable, thanks to the lack of natural predators and strict legal protection. A recent DNA analysis study by Andersson and her research team found that Hong Kong’s feral cockatoos have unexpectedly high genetic diversity and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Indonesia’s government is imposing new restrictions on access to geospatial data, raising concerns among researchers and activists that it will suppress environmental science and advocacy work in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. For around a month, visitors to an interactive mapping platform maintained by the Ministry of Forestry have been greeted with a pop-up legal notice warning that the information is “view-only” and that anyone who “downloads” or “extracts” it without the ministry’s written permission “will be prosecuted” under the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions, or ITE, Law. Anyone who wants to use the once freely accessible platform, known as SIGAP, must first agree to “terms and conditions” stating that the relevant articles in the ITE Law “carry penalties of up to 9 years in prison and/or a fine of up to Rp 3 billion [$170,000],” the notice says. On Sept. 21, the ministry’s Directorate General of Forestry Planning posted a video to Instagram outlining a new application process that requires prospective users to disclose their research aims and submit supporting documents. Doni Prabowo, the department’s head of forest monitoring and geospatial information, told Mongabay that restrictions were needed because geospatial data had been uncontrolled for a long time, creating opportunities for manipulation and illegal trading of the country’s precious information. “What if somebody manipulates the data and says certain areas are not protected forest [when they really are]? It could be dangerous,” Doni said by phone. He said he’d heard of the ministry’s geospatial data being listed…This article was originally published on Mongabay

SINGAPORE — “For seven thousand years, Singapore has changed around these reefs,” says Debby Ng, a Singaporean biologist who studies the city-state’s shrinking coastal and marine habitats. “They are still here.” Despite colonization, war, shipping and industrialization, reefs a few kilometers south of Singapore’s gleaming shoreline have endured. “It would be a tragedy if we were to lose them now — in peacetime, at the height of our prosperity, when we possess more knowledge and capacity to protect them than any generation before us,” Ng tells Mongabay. At a National Day rally on Aug. 23, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced plans to merge a cluster of islands sprawled across a few thousand hectares of seascape into a new “western island” for advanced manufacturing, energy and defense. No timeline for the western island project was given. Wong said reclamation would take place “over the coming decades” and that plans were being studied carefully. But the announcement has alarmed Singapore’s marine conservation community, which says the project could affect some of the country’s most biodiverse waters. The islands include Pulau Semakau, which houses Singapore’s offshore landfill, and Pulau Bukom, home to an oil refinery, as well as Pulau Sudong and smaller islands including Pulau Hantu, Pulau Jong and Pulau Sebarok. The area is estimated to contain some 590 hectares (1,460 acres) of coral reefs — about 60% of the total in Singapore — along with 22% of the city-state’s seagrass meadows and 5% of its mangroves. Black sun coral (Tubastraea micranthus), Singapore.…This article was originally published on Mongabay