Ashley D'Souza

As the first woman curator of the National Museum of Natural History’s collection of amphibians and reptiles, Doris Cochran shaped herpetology at the museum and beyond.

Smithsonian researcher Sarah Johnson studies bison specimens to understand how the species’s genetic diversity changed after its decline.

A grassroots effort to save nightjars shows that the future of conserving elusive birds depends on citizen science.

With bird populations in steep decline, weather radar provides insights into when and where birds migrate and how to prevent collisions.

Environmental justice reporting can be emotionally heavy and hard to swallow, but “there are some really uplifting stories,” the KSJ Fellow explains.

One research group in Boston is using local materials and accessible methods to restore marshland and protect the coast against intensified storms — but funding delays put their work in jeopardy.

Audio journalism story about the science behind Miyawaki mini-forests and a mini-forest planting event in Brookline. Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

There’s a new way to measure how well AI understands a scientific domain, according to one lab at MIT — and the results show that AI has a long way to go.
A paper by researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems suggests that current evaluation methods don’t test AI’s actual ability to understand science.

This summer, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) launched a pilot program to study cavity-nesting bees to learn how to bolster their declining populations. Biologists installed 65 bee hotels — wooden blocks built with nesting cavities — on farms in the Lake Champlain region, then monitored which species checked into the hotels and how they responded to various pesticides...

As a queer person doing their best to survive the past few months of political chaos, I’ve often turned to nature — specifically, wild animals — for guidance.

Climate change is pushing manufacturers to use more sustainable, weather-resistant, and noncombustible materials.
Outdoor living products are becoming highly customizable, which expands their applications and saves time for architects.
As the indoors spill into the outdoors, interior designers are playing a larger role in creating cohesive spaces.

On a typical workday at RARE Restoration, Seth Barrett would arrive at the shop to see that his four in-house employees already had all the tools and machines up and running. He’d spend the first half of the day interacting with customers and returning projects to them. He’d then go downstairs to his workshop and work on repairs, while his two on-the-field employees worked in people’s homes.

That was during good times. Now Barrett is down to just one other employee, and work is scarce.

Since the beginning of the U.S. outbreak in January 2022, bird flu has been found in approximately 12,000 wild birds nationally, with cases in all 50 states. The virus has also caused outbreaks in poultry and dairy cows, leading to nearly 70 human cases in the U.S., primarily in dairy and poultry workers.

Now, birds in Brookline are falling victim to bird flu as Massachusetts faces its largest outbreak of the virus yet. Here’s what the town is doing to address bird flu and how to stay safe.

Flash fiction story published in The Margins, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop's award-winning literary magazine.

I return to you, Bird Freaks, from my longest hiatus yet. Would you believe me if I said that you didn’t hear from me for the past nine (or ten) months because I was pregnant? In a sense of the word, I was: pregnant with ideas for news stories, features, poems, and songs, and busy writing, publishing, and performing all of them. I am proud to announce that I have since birthed those pieces, and they are out finding their places in the world. I am left with an empty nest.