The Guardian Weekly

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Tackling invasive species, saving seeds and building bird boxes are some of the ways biodiversity loss is being stemmed

Costa Rica

In the 1990s, Costa Rica had one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. The tiny but biodiverse country introduced a scheme to pay landowners to care for the environment. It has reversed deforestation and leads the way with green initiatives – including awarding citizenship to bees in a suburb of the capital, San José.

Technology Researchers have discovered a way to detect environmental DNA in the air, enabling them to find animals hundreds of metres away, a breakthrough that could help monitor biodiversity in a non-invasive, safe manner.

Rewilding

Legal protection, habitat restoration and reintroductions can drive species recovery, say researchers who looked at 50 wildlife species in Europe whose population size and distribution have expanded over the past 40 years. Among the success stories is the Eurasian beaver, which has increased its range by 835% since 1955, with a

16,705% increase in species abundance since 1960.

Seed banks

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault V lt and d th the Mill Millennium i Seed Bank (MSB) at Kew are leading the way in saving seeds for future generations. At Svalbard, duplicates of more than 1m seed varieties from almost every country in the world are stored. The MSB has a collection of more than 2.4bn seeds, with contributions from 97 countries since 2000. Both banks aim to safeguard as much unique plant genetic material as possible.

Humans V Nature

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