Biodiversity

Climate change, coastal development and overfishing have effectively wiped out nearly a fifth of the world’s coral reefs, and by the end of this century they “are unlikely to look much like the reefs that we are familiar with today,” said Peter Mumby, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, who envisions smaller and weaker reefs that harbor fewer fish.

“But there will still be reefs and they will still be very important,” he said. “And so what we really have to do is take all the steps we can locally to

Check out seven ways scientists and conservationists are pushing to preserve reefs for future generations.

2009 saw vast patches of the planet protected and world leaders pledge to fight global warming, but the climate continued to change dramatically–putting it in the “loss” column for the environment this year, according to experts who spoke to National Geographic.

A decade ago, global climate change was largely considered a problem for the distant future. But it seems that future has come sooner than predicted.

One of the most remarkable, and alarming, environmental changes to occur over the last decade is the melting of Antarctic ice sheets and the recession of Arctic glaciers at speeds much faster than climate change models had predicted, according to environment experts.

A giant woolly rat found in Papua New Guinea is just one of hundreds of species previously unknown to science that were brought to light in 2009. These discoveries are just one of ten things the environment gained in 2009.

There are winners and losers on the racetrack of speciation – the process of species splitting into new species, according to Michael Alfaro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Los Angeles. He and his colleagues analyzed DNA and fossils from 44 major lineages of jawed vertebrates to calculate which ones have exceptionally fast and slow rates of speciation.

The Caribbean monk seal has joined a long and growing list of species that carry the “extinct” label. Learn about this and seven other extinct species that have made headlines in recent years.

The rise and fall of the seas may have a more lethal toll on Earth’s life than asteroids and supervolcanoes, according to a new study.

Over the past 540 million years, every increase in the rate of extinctions—including the five so-called mass extinctions—has been linked to environmental changes wrought by changing sea levels, the study says.