Discover how a new awareness of nature is helping to restore ecosystems from Panama to China to Mozambique. See how innovative actions are being taken to repair man-made damage and restore reefs, rivers, animal populations and more.
Explore how a new understanding of nature is helping us find surprising ways to fix it. From the Pacific Northwest to Yellowstone to Scotland, scientists, citizens and activists are restoring the environment, benefiting humans and animals alike.
2020 • Nature
In the misty and lush tropical forest surrounding South Africa's Soutpansberg Mountains, a 600-year-old outeniqua yellowwood tree reigns supreme. It's 115 feet tall, and a source of food and shelter for an array of plants and animals. Crowned eagles construct massive nests in her fold, and Samango monkeys take refuge in her branches. As if it wasn't unique enough, this ancient, endangered tree has no flowers, instead reproducing through male and female cones-a marvel of the natural world, and a true South African treasure.
The Taiga forest, on the edge of the Arctic, is a silent world of stunted conifers. The trees may be small but filming from the air reveals its true scale. A third of all trees on Earth grow here and during the short summer they produce enough oxygen to change the atmosphere.
10/11 • Planet Earth • 2006 • Nature
Steve Backshall reveals the incredible influence that insects and their close relatives have on Earth's many ecosystems. In the grasslands of South America the landscape has been created almost solely by one team of insects - grass-cutter ants. Across the world's oceans one tiny creature plays such a key role that, without it, the largest animal on our planet, the blue whale, could not exist. And in East Africa the savannah would quickly be swamped in dung were it not for the activities of a certain beetle. Yet the greatest influence of all comes from a group of insects that have ultimately changed the colour and diversity of our planet.
2/3 • Insect Worlds • 2013 • Nature
So, you think you know penguins? Experience life in "Penguin Paradise", on South Island, New Zealand, from which the first penguins are supposed to have evolved. Home to unusual penguins like the Little Penguin, and the forest-dwelling crested Fiordland Penguin - it is a penguin wonderland!
At more than 1,200 miles, the Orange River is the longest in South Africa. Join as we trace its westward journey, bringing to its shores a diverse sample of African wildlife, large and small. From powerful swimming birds like the African darter, to flat lizards who inhabit the granite rocks of the mighty Augrabies Falls, it's the journey of life-bringing water passing through some of the continent's most diverse and dramatic landscapes.
6/6 • Extreme Africa • 2017 • Nature
Professor Richard Fortey journeys high in the Rocky Mountains to explore a 520-million-year-old fossilised seabed containing bizarre and experimental lifeforms that have revolutionised our understanding about the beginnings of complex life. Among the amazing finds he uncovers are marine creatures with five eyes and a proboscis; filter-feeders shaped like tulips; worm-like scavengers covered in spikes but with no identifiable head or anus; and a metre-long predator resembling a giant shrimp.
1/3 • Fossil Wonderlands: Nature's Hidden Treasures • 2014 • Nature
