Islands not only have served as the settings for exotic holidays but also act as a dream for directors to use as a canvas for their stories. These are some of the most exciting film and TV locations you can visit today.

Death in Paradise (2011)

Guadeloupe, French Caribbean

The location: Guadeloupe’s landscapes are strikingly varied, ranging from the pearly white sand and deep blue waters of beaches to the volcanic, lunar-like interior.

While you’re there: Explore Deshaies, a town home to several Death in Paradise filming locations.

How to do it: Seven nights at Club Med La Caravelle from £2, 305 per person, all-inclusive, includes flights from Heathrow to Pointe-a-Pitrevia Paris.

Eat, Pray, Love (2010)

Bali, Indonesia

The location: Ubud, a town in the center of Bali, means “medicine” in Balinese, so locals have leng regarded it as a place for healing. That’s what it is most famous for. It impresses audience with stunning jungle scenery and a thriving arts scene.

While you’re there: Dive into Ubud’s rich cultural history on a walking tour, enjoying some of the region’s most striking architecture and history.

How to do it: A nine-day tour of Bali-including Ubud, Lombok and Seminyak-costs £5,300 per person. It includes flights, transfers, accommodation and excursions (游览).

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Skellig Michael, County Kerry, Ireland

The location: Eight miles off the Irish coast, Skellig Michael is now better known as the hideout of Luke Skywalker.

While you’re there: Look out for the colony of puffins that nest on the island in the summer. The birds were digitally designed as a cute fictional species called porgs in a later sequel (续集).

How to do it: Tour Radar’s seven-day Hiking & Island Hopping-Cork and Kerry costs from £2,101 per person, which covers accommodation, meals and excursions.

Chaudhary quietly weaves together lengths of ropes, binding them with grass collected from the riverbank. She skillfully shapes the materials into a jewelry box. Meanwhile, she’s instructing a group of women to work out the materials. The ropes used were once the lifeline for climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then discarded (扔掉). They are now finding new life, transformed by skilled hands into items to sell.

Acharya, working with the cleaning campaign, owns a waste processing business in Kathmandu, also an advocate for sustainable waste management. “Aluminum and other metal waste go through the recycling process, but we found no way to recycle ropes and gas cans,” she says. It struck her that the non-recyclable waste could be reused, but it wasn’t until she met Maya Rai that a solution emerged. Rai, leading Nepal Knotcraft Centre, helped connect Acharya with Chaudhary’s team of craftswomen in hopes of turning the mountain waste into economic opportunity. “While this seems insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start. We aim to connect local expertise, mountain waste and local economy,” says Acharya, proudly displaying a mat made from ropes left on Mt. Qomolangma by climbers. Her goal is to ensure that no waste collected from mountains ends up in a landfill again.

Finished crafts are sold at outlets and exhibitions. The craftswomen are paid according to how many items they make and sell. With flexible hours, the project gives women an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain household responsibilities.

Eventually, Acharya hopes to expand the program to involve more women and process more waste. But progress has been slow. “We still have not found a sustainable business plan to make crafts in large quantities, ”she says. Now, she is searching for cooperators to make a model that serves not only the mountain but the communities. “After all, we are trying to craft a sustainable future.”

Each rope turned into a decorative item is a way to help local women earn a living and keep mountains clean.

Huddled in small groups around laptops, 20 Brazilian teenagers are using an app to build a skill that’s vital to the future of their entire community. The teenagers belong to the Guarani indigenous (本地的) people and they are fluent in speaking both Portuguese and their mother tongue, Guarani Mbya. But when it comes to writing, they often use Portuguese as that’s what they were first taught to write in, putting the Guarani Mbya language in its written form at risk of disappearing. But since March of this year, they’ve been using an app to improve their ability to write in Guarani Mbya. The app is part of a project funded by IBM to create AI tools to help preserve and expand the use of indigenous languages in Brazil.

Of the 7,000 or so languages that exist in the world, about a fifth are thought to be endangered, with the United Nations estimating that half of these will be extinct by 2100 — the majority being indigenous languages. The movement to prevent indigenous languages from disappearing has prompted a number of tech-centric language preservation and expansion projects. For example, in New Zealand, an app has been developed to collect oral recordings of indigenous languages across the region to help speakers boost their everyday use of their native language.

But embracing technology and the desire to protect culture and language are often at odds in indigenous communities, as Dr. Burbank has observed. “A minority group that’s fighting to preserve a counterculture (反主流文化) will create walls around the culture to try not to dilute (削弱) it, because the majority culture is automatically going to wipe that culture out,” says Dr. Burbank. While many of the indigenous communities Dr. Burbank works with feel technology could contribute to that dilution, she believes it can benefit indigenous communities.

Efforts to restore forests have often focused on trees, but a new study in the journal Philosophical Transactions finds that animals play a key role in the recovery of tree species by carrying a wide variety of seeds into previously deforested areas.

Sergio Estrada-Villegas, a professor at the Yale School of the Environment, led the study with Liza Comita, a professor of tropical forest ecology. The project examines a series of regenerating forests in central Panama spanning 20 to 100 years post-abandonment. “When we talk about forest restoration, people typically think about going out and digging holes and planting seedlings,” Comita says. “That’s actually not a very cost-effective or efficient way to restore natural forests. If you have a nearby preserved intact (完整的) forest, plus you have your animal seed dispersers around, you can get natural regeneration, which is a less costly and labor-intensive approach.”

The research team analyzed a unique, long-term data set from the forest in Panama, to compare what proportion of tree species in forests were spread by animals or other methods, like wind or gravity, and how that changes over time as the forest ages. It proves that in tropical forests, more than 80% of tree species can be spread by animals.

The researchers say the findings can serve as a road map for natural regeneration of forests that preserve biodiversity and capture and store carbon at a time when the UN Decade on Restoration is highlighting the need for land conservation, and the world is working to mitigate climate change stemming from fossil fuel emissions. Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in biomass and soils. Tropical forests, in particular, play an important role in regulating global climate and supporting high plant and animal diversity, the researchers note.

Estrada-Villegas, says the study highlights how crucial animals are to healthy forests. “In these tropical environments, animals are very important to a speedy recovery of forests,” says Estrada-Villegas.