Palau's lagoons run hot enough to bleach the Great Barrier Reef, and the corals there are fine. In August the people who look after Australia's reef flew to Koror to see how, and came home with a model worth copying.
Norfolk Island's lagoon reef is honestly in trouble, rated High Concern this year. Yet the offshore coral is thriving, a fifth of the lagoon's pale corals turn out to be perfectly healthy, and the septics draining to the bay are being replaced. Here is what gives the scientists hope.
Nearly a million camera trap photographs a year, and someone has to look at every one. In West Arnhem Land the Warddeken rangers asked their Elders first, then put an open source AI to work on the sorting, and won back four months a year for the real job: looking after Country.
Leatherbacks are the biggest turtles on Earth, and the ones that nest in the Solomon Islands are among the rarest. A new study says the beach that has been guarded longest is filling with nests again, and most of its turtles swim south to us.
Tasmania has more than two hundred kinds of orchid and seventy seven of them are threatened. One of the rarest took eight years to grow in a lab, with a fungus that turned out to prefer quinoa. Then a cocker spaniel showed the scientists where it was hiding.
In 2016 a strip of Perth's Beeliar Wetlands was cleared for a highway extension that was never built. Eight years after 280,000 seedlings went in, the survey is back: 97 species of animal, Carnaby's cockatoos among them, and a bush that is well on its way.
Seagrass meadows feed the turtles and dugongs and store carbon faster than a rainforest. In Gladstone Harbour they are being replanted beside new oyster reefs, in a trial paid for by an insurance company's foundation and run by the people who know the water best.
Weeping Myall woodland once ran across the western plains and most of it was cleared for cropping and grazing. On a property near Coonamble, a farming company is planting almost a thousand hectares of it back, with the grazing to follow once the trees are up.
A national network to find out where the Christmas beetles went, 25,000 native plantings on Ngarrindjeri Country, and a shorebird patrol at Shark Bay. Five projects shared $150,000 this week, and every one of them is the patient kind.
Two stations on the Gulf Plains and one on Cape York Peninsula, almost 396,000 hectares of wetlands, waterholes and savanna woodland, are joining Australia's protected area network. Queensland bought them with The Nature Conservancy and two philanthropic partners.
Mala, the rufous hare wallaby, vanished from the wild in 1991. Twenty four were brought home to Uluru in 2005. This May, Anangu, Mala Rangers and park staff counted them at nearly 500.
America's rarest wolf lives wild in one corner of North Carolina, fewer than forty animals in all. In April three pups born at a zoo in Missouri were placed in a wild mother's den at seven days old. Months later, the cameras found all three alive and growing.
