Friday Fauna Feature: Border Wildlife Study Pollinators
June 26, 2020We designed our Border Wildlife Study to detect vertebrate species such as mammals and birds. Surprisingly, we keep finding invertebrates on our cameras and we love the multitude of insects…
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Waiting for Monsoon Rain – Where to Track the Season
June 24, 2020With triple digit temperatures here in Tucson, it’s officially time to start waiting, watching, yearning, and hoping for monsoon rains! Sky Island Alliance staff are known to run out of the…
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Celebrating Pride Month
June 23, 2020Many of the faces, and facets of conservation and environmentalism in the U.S. are not visible or celebrated. When I look back on my own conservation biology studies, I remember the predominant focus on…
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Pollinators and Interns
June 22, 2020As we celebrate National Pollinators Week and kick off our Binational Internship Program, we’d like to highlight the amazing work of our 2019 Pollinator Conservation Interns last summer! In collaboration with the National Park Service…
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Friday Fauna Feature: Animals Immediately Return after Fire at the Border
June 19, 2020On May 31, 2020, lightning ignited a wildfire in the San Rafael Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border at one of Border Wildlife Study camera sites. After several days, the fire reached our wildlife camera as it burned across about 400…
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Springs and the Bighorn Fire
June 17, 2020On June 5, 2020, lightning ignited the Bighorn Fire which continues to burn this week across the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. Fire is a natural and necessary component…
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Coffee Break Recap—The Incredible Story of Jaguars in the Borderlands
June 16, 2020Together we celebrated World Jaguar Day last week with Turtle Southern from the Northern Jaguar Project and Randy Serraglio from the Center for Biological Diversity. They both shared inspiring stories of jaguars roaming across the borderlands and discussed conservation opportunities for jaguars in both the U.S….
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Friday Flora Feature: Monkeyflowers
June 12, 2020Monkeyflowers are iconic desert plants found here in the Sky Island region and in much of the Western United States. Today’s Friday Flora Feature highlights the scarlet monkeyflower (Erythranthe cardinalis) and the seep monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttata). It’s all in the name..or is it? Biologists and nature enthusiasts tend to use scientific…
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Springs—Oases of the future?
June 10, 2020Last week, a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment by Jennifer Cartwright and colleagues (including Sky Island Alliance’s very own Sami Hammer and Louise Misztal) was published that describes the inspiring potential for springs to provide refuge for a…
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Mexico Abandons its Protected Areas
June 5, 2020Ignored for many decades, Protected Areas (PAs) in Mexico finally got the attention of the federal government in the mid ‘90s thanks to the demands of civil society and prominent environmental groups. Between 1996 and 1999, a series of new PAs were…
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