#volunteer-trail-restoration

#volunteer-trail-restoration

Citizen Science Month is built around a goal of 2.5 million 'Acts of Science,' tying the annual event to America's 250th birthday through a simple but powerful idea: lots of small contributions can add up to something really meaningful.

The Pet Assistance and Support Program has made it easier for thousands to enter shelters and move into permanent housing, serving 4,407 people between 2020 and 2024.

The sweepstakes offers a chance to win a once-in-a-lifetime prize trip to extraordinary locations, including Alaska and the Galápagos Islands.

Decades of national park visitation and outdoor recreation economic data are buried in government spreadsheets. I built this to make it actually usable, whether you work in outdoor rec or just want to know how many people went to Yellowstone last year.

Three Falls State Park is centered around three waterfalls, including the 128-foot Frontenac Falls, which cascades down through a wooded gorge before meeting the lake.

Around a third of UK gardeners use pesticides, and our studies found that house sparrow numbers, for example, were nearly 40% lower in gardens where the pesticide metaldehyde was used. By reducing pesticide use, you can actively encourage birds back into your outdoor spaces, as they rely on invertebrates such as slugs and snails as natural prey.

The city of Orlando happens to have the most green space per resident than any other major city, according to a new analysis from travel platform BookRetreats. The city, known as The City Beautiful, offers roughly 2,777 square feet of greenery per person. That translates to more than 148 parks, gardens, and recreation areas, according to the study, with plenty of lakes, trails, and botanical gardens to explore.

If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested.

A lot of people really underestimate the sizes of our national parks, as well as the accessibility of certain features. A lot of people come to Death Valley, and they want to see that, but they don't often realize that it's along a pretty crappy, 25-mile dirt road, and it often takes well over an hour and a half to get to.

The idea that hiking trails are a tool for conservation is based on a simple premise: people protect what they know. That requires making conservation areas accessible. There's no point telling people you only protect what you know, if you don't give them the tools to know. The trail is this tool. People who hike, people who camp, these people often become defenders of the environment.

The annual Transition Bikes work trip to some of the wildest terrain in Washington state looked like a wicked fun time, and this video shares all the hootin' and hollerin' that went down in one of the best places on earth to ride a bike. From fireside brews, dark dirt, good grub, and all the camaraderie you'd expect from a bunch of hooligans out in the woods on bikes,

Visitors can skip the entrance fees at California parks on Monday, part of a state effort to reduce barriers to accessing the outdoors. More than 200 California state parks are offering the free vehicle entry including motorcycles on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday to California residents and visitors. Entrance fees are typically around $10. The complete list of parks offering free entry on Monday can be found here.

The body is a shifting landscape transformed by surfaces and sensations. Each look captures a different tactile world: the heat of blood, the cool weight of metal, the yielding drift of water. The result is a sculptural study of how the elements carve, shield, and release the self. The materials we embody become the emotions we carry, and the body becomes a materialised exhibition of our emotions, from the pulse of Blood to the discipline of Metal to the surrender of Water.

You may dream of seeing the geysers of Yellowstone or the overwhelming greatness of the Grand Canyon, but chances are you have a handful of little wonders in your own backyard. State parks like Goblin Valley in Utah hold their own against the neighboring Arches National Park (or Canyonlands, for that matter), while Maine's Baxter State Park is arguably just as wild as the well-known Acadia National Park (Baxter doesn't even have running water!). Plus, state parks tend to be less crowded and more affordable-two things that bode well for overnight guests.

Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development - often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.

Many of them were built for purposes that no longer exist - cattle drives, mining prospecting, early U.S. Forest Service fire patrols - while others were packed by the footprints of the Chumash people well before the colonization of North America. Sections of trail cling to steep slopes that seem to barely resist gravity, shedding soil and stone with each winter storm.

The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.