The BMD project, launched in March 2025, will develop a Single Access Point (SAP) as a centralised platform to monitor and drive evidence-based biodiversity conservation across Europe. The SAP will give policymakers and Natura 2000 managers easy access to high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools with AI species identification services, enabling faster, more accurate and more frequent data collection over larger areas and longer timeframes. It will also unlock historical baseline biodiversity data that is currently scattered, hard to find, or known only to experts. With online projection tools that are co-designed with the stakeholder communities, the SAP will help assess species conservation status, track biodiversity trends, and predict the impact of changes on land, in freshwater, and at sea—from local landscapes to larger scales. These insights will directly support the planning, management, and expansion of protected areas, while also improving conservation strategies by forecasting the effects of future land cover and climate change.

Earth Day 2025: Shermin de Silva, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, researches the ecology, social dynamics and communication of elephants. In this Q&A, de Silva provides an inside look at her new book on elephant behavior and conservation, along with insights on how to protect their future.

Wildfires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, burning more than 16,000 structures, uprooting neighborhoods and displacing entire communities. As the infernos raged, DRI scientists with a wide range of expertise in soil science, air quality, and post-wildfire impacts put together a plan for collecting ash, dust, soil, and building material samples from the burn zones. To them, these urban fires presented a unique opportunity to understand how materials like plastics, metals, and even lithium batteries from electric cars can transform into environmental contaminants when they burn.

Okinawa and its surrounding waters represent what marine biologists call a "shark and ray hotspot" in terms of both diversity and conservation significance. In this episode of the OIST podcast, Dr. Fabienne Ziadi-Künzli, a marine biologist and shark researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), explained that this region creates unique habitats for sharks throughout their different life stages.

Barrier islands, which cover a majority of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, protect coastal infrastructure, beach towns and ecosystems — such as marshes, mangroves and seagrass meadows — from damaging storms and high-energy waves. In a recent study, researchers from Texas A&M University led by Dr. Orencio Duran Vinent gained a better understanding of what makes a barrier island a “barrier.” 

Texas A&M University doctoral student Andrea Porter’s research explores a better fit for women in body armor.

Laser-plasma accelerators can accelerate particles over distances that are up to 1000 times shorter than those required by conventional accelerators. The technology promises compact systems that have enormous potential to open up new applications for accelerators, for example in medicine or industry. However, the current prototypes have one drawback: most can only accelerate a few particle bunches per second – not enough for practical applications. DESY’s new flagship laser KALDERA has now made a decisive step forward: driving the compact plasma accelerator MAGMA, the innovative laser has shown to accelerate 100 particle bunches per second. This increased repetition rate opens the path to actively stabilise the plasma accelerator performance in the future which will bring it a good deal closer to first applications.