Our first guest for this edition of the Mongabay Newscast is Eddie Carver, a Mongabay contributor based in Madagascar who recently reported about a troubled company that is hoping to mine rare earth elements in Madagascar’s Ampasindava peninsula, to make electronic gadgets. This is a highly biodiverse region that is home to numerous endangered lemur species, some of which live nowhere else on Earth.

Then we speak with Jo Wood, an Environmental Water Project Officer in Victoria, Australia. In this Field Notes segment, Wood plays for us the calls of a number of indicator species like whistling ducks and "pobblebonks" (also called "banjo frogs") which appear when her team floods their dried up wetland home -- this audio evidence helps her assess the overall success of the "rewetting program" and the health of the wetlands ecosystem.

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“It was a complete breakthrough for me to realize that sharing from the heart, which is the opposite of what we’re taught to do as scientists, was the way for me to connect with people,” Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, tells us in this episode of the Mongabay Newscast. She is an acclaimed climate communicator and a professor at Texas Tech University and last year, she teamed up with her local TV station to write and produce a web series called "Global Weirding," which tackles common questions, misconceptions, and myths around climate science, politics, and religion.

We check in with Hayhoe right as she’s in the midst of shooting Season 2 of "Global Weirding."

We are also joined by Branko Hilje Rodriguez, a PhD student from Costa Rica, where he’s studying the soundscapes of different successional stages of the tropical dry forest in Santa Rosa National Park, the largest remaining remnant of tropical dry forest in Mesoamerica.

In this Field Note segment, Hilje Rodriguez plays for us a number of the recordings he’s made in the park, allowing us to hear the sounds of the dry forest during different stages of regrowth and different seasons, as well as some of the iconic bird species that call the dry forest home.

Please help us improve the Mongabay Newscast by leaving a review on its page at Android, Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you subscribe to it. Thanks!