this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. i am michaela strachan, a wildlife presenter who is passionate about conservation. my work has taken me all over the world. and in that time, i have seen huge changes, many due to climate change. in extreme conservation, we meet inspirational people who've dedicated their lives to protecting the natural world. this time, i'm in turkey.

this country's stunning forests are facing devastating losses. but it is notjust the trees that need saving. it is also the creatures. i'm meeting the remarkable people trying to save honeybees... you are a bee whisperer! ..and those building turkey's brown bears a safe to roam. this is extreme conservation turkey. turkey is huge, a vast and varied country stretching over 1,500km. turkey is surrounded by water on three sides — the mediterranean sea,

the black sea and the aegean — and then in the east, it's mountainous and rugged, and all that influences the climate in very different ways. it is a country that is so rich in natural diversity, its sweeping pine forests are one of its key assets. but as temperatures rise, these forests are being destroyed by wildfires that are getting ever more intense. i start myjourney in mugla province on turkey's western coast, a short boat ride from the coastal town of bodrum where thick pine forests stretch all the way down to the beaches. like so many places around the world, summers here have got hotter and drier, and recently, they have had horrendous forest fires that have completely changed the landscape.

all of this used to be green forest, and now look at it. here in mugla, an area bigger than 100 football fields was wiped out in a matter of days. and these most recent fires were more ferocious than any wildfire turkey has ever seen before. huseyin aydin is one of the many thousands of people who have lost almost everything in the fires.

people rely on these forests to make a living, not from the trees themselves, but from the creatures that live in them. these trees are vital for the survival of one of the most important insects on the planet, an insect you might not immediately associate with forests — the honeybee. a stroll down a street in datca, a port town in the region, and you can clearly see how central honey is to the economy here. this is the honey that is pretty unique to this area, it's not flower honey, it is pine honey. it's produced from pine trees and in fact almost all the pine honey in the world comes from this little corner of turkey. i have never tried pine honey

before, so i am very much looking forward to this. apparently it tastes very different. 0oh...that is so good! mm! tastes woody, almost spicy. but pine honey isn't made by a bee alone. a small grub called marchalina hellenica has a big role to play. i am meeting yonca tokbas, a bee expert, to find out more about these intriguing insects and how they contribute to making pine honey. yonca, hello! hello! she has dedicated herself to preserving the bees�* way of life, even running ultra marathons for her bee—focused cause. what a beautiful forest. this is a healthy forest. you get the smell and the sound of the forest. this is the bug.

that tiny little thing there?! yep! it is taking the sap from the pine tree, then creating this liquid — can you see that? and that is what the bee is taking from the pine tree. that tiny, tiny, tiny animal that you have so much difficulty seeing is the magic creator of the whole process. more than half of these essential grubs were wiped out by the fires. if you don't have this insect, you do not have food for bees and you don't have the pine honey. with natural food sources dwindling and many hives destroyed, yonca warns that some honey producers are putting too much pressure on the remaining bees.

we encourage their sickness like treating them with chemicals or trying to feed them unnatural sugary stuff so they can produce more than they can. so basically, we are exploiting bees? exactly, it's an abuse. alper kuyucu comes from a long line of bee farmers. to him and his family, bees are notjust a source of income, but a way of life. they are not even bothering you, they clearly know you. you are a bee whisperer! mm—hmm. alpar uses traditional methods to look after his 10 million bees. that's amazing. wow, look at all those bees!

alper�*s way is simple — he believes the bees should be left to do what they do naturally — collect the nectar from the wild and return to the hive to make honey. this is not the optimum production method. intensively farmed bees just come out of their hives and drink the sugar water left for them, and then go back in to produce what alper calls false honey. they do not travel around the ecosystem as they should, pollinating plants, including our fruit and vegetables. he says they get unhealthy and die sooner. this is a pot of alper�*s honey, naturally produced, and it really does taste delicious. it is interesting, isn't it,

how we are all familiar with battery farming, exploiting chickens for eggs and meat, but how many of us have thought about the exploitation of bees with intense beekeeping and the damage that that's doing? it seems to me that the extreme conservation for bees is to go back to basics, go back to this, the traditional way of beekeeping. for alper, the recovery of the pine forests is crucial. until then, these bees have limited resources to survive. what are the main things that people need to understand about bees for their future conservation? plant, for example, some of the flowers that they love, it's a food resource for them. this is the amount of honey that a bee can produce in a lifetime. for one bee, just in that?!

just in that — do not waste it. finding out each bee producesjust one—twelfth of a teaspoon of honey has made me think about how much we use. for yonca, she is determined to save the bees by inspiring the next generation. the youth is amazing, they are much more aware than we are, and they are working on trying to help nature more than our generation i would say. when we think of forests, we think of their importance to fight climate change, but they are equally important for biodiversity. so much of our wildlife lives and thrives in a forest. as we have seen here with a honeybee and that tiny, little bug — the marchalina hellenica — it would not survive if it was not for all of these trees. it's a precious ecosystem that desperately needs protecting.

continuing myjourney of extreme conservation, i am in the mountains of east turkey. i have travelled 1,400 kilometres from the aegean coast to sarikamis on the armenian border. in winter, this area is popularfor skiing, but it is mainly a farming region. over time, lots of forests have been felled for pastures, leaving just a patchwork of trees behind. but i am here as this is home to turkey's majestic migrating brown bear. naturally, the bears would live in these mountains during the spring and summer,

and then when food becomes harder to find in the autumn. some of them travel over 100 kilometres to the black sea reagion when they fatten up and come back to hibernate for winter. but this natural pattern of behaviour has now been disrupted. researchers aysegul and emrah have been observing the bears for over a decade, and have dedicated their lives to protecting them. i am joining the duo in the hope of getting a glimpse of these magnificent creatures. hello! hi, michaela! so, you're listening for the bears, hey? yes, we are searching for the signals of one of the collared bears, one of the collared bear. we understand the signal has moved. emrah and aysegul have been collecting detailed data on the bears to understand how human activity is impacting their migration habits.

the forests they live in have become fragmented, dramatically changing their behaviour. we are here before dusk to increase our chances of seeing them. and we are in luck. this has been really exciting, we have seen seven bears come out of this forest including two cubs, but the only reason we are seeing so many of them together is because they're on their way to this, the dump site and they're going there to feed. the bears are here to scavenge. some of their forests have been overtaken by urban development, so they're forced to feed on our rubbish. oh, my word.

look at them, there's so many of them, and there are cubs as well. so many of them. one, two, three. . .18. is that what you counted, just in this bit? yeah. this is really depressing. look, and you can see the cubs, even. for me, it's exciting to see bears, but not like this. i mean, this is really, really sad. now, here is too much food. they are not fighting, they're trying to eat leftover, but many times they eat the plastics. the young cubs copy the adults, and so learn this scavenging behaviour. cub learning — eat in the garbage. yeah, he's walking off with a whole bag of rubbish. some bear is very fatty and very

lazy because of bear is not moving too much. this is a really sad sight, and it is all—too—familiar sight across the world. as habitats are being destroyed, wild animals forced to come into built—up areas to find food. a massive problem that needs a massive solution. the team has come up with an ambitious plan to lure the bears away from the dump. they want to create a new travel route for the bears. taking existing patches of forest, they're planting 11 million trees to fill in the gaps. this forested route will stretch over 160 kilometres,

right up to the georgian border, creating turkey's first wildlife corridor. they hope it will entice the bears to migrate once again. this is perfect for bears. it's thick, healthy forest, but then itjust stops and there's this vast expanse of nothing. and the next forest is 1a kilometres away, so this habitat has become really fragmented. the bears have a big role to play in this ecosystem. they keep the balance amongst the animals that roam these forests — the lynx, the wolves, even the rabbits. these all have a kind of silent agreement with each other. if you take out one species out, we could think the health and balance agreement would not exist anymore.

we are tracking along their route looking for any clues to show at least some of them are still trying to make the journey. look. 0h, are they the prints? yeah, this is footprints. this is our rubbing trees. you can see, so this is where the bears come and rub. yes, some hairs and scratching here. i can see that. yeah, like this. yes, some bears scratch but most bears like this, this. oh, that must be great to see. this is the sort of information emrah and aysegul have been painstakingly collecting for ten years. this is like the— our eyes in the forest.

they have installed around 50 of these cameras, which help them document the animals natural behaviours and their relationships with each other. and they've also collared some with gps trackers so they can map how they move around in this patchwork of forest and see where they are running into trouble. this is the bear movement. it is recorded every hour. we have the information of their movement, their behaviour, the time they are spending in the spot. it tells us that these animals need more space to move, to go further. also in the way are the pastures cleared for farming.

these are the gaps that are planned to be planted. aysegul and emrah�*s data shows some of the braver bears do still move between forests, and they hope that more tree cover will encourage others to migrate.

the initial trees in the project were planted only a few months ago. i'm joining bulent aydin to plant one of the first saplings in this area. hey! she laughs. well, i've played a tiny part of a huge and exciting project. it's going to take years before it's finished. but wouldn't it be amazing to come back here and see this whole area forested, full of bears and lynx and wolves and so much other wildlife, and become an incredibly precious ecosystem? only when the wildlife is roaming

freely in the forests and can find food in nature can this dump be safely shut off to bears. 20 years later, i hope everywhere is trees, not open area like this. the bear is not eat the trash, just the healthy food. and can you imagine these large carnivores we are working with just hanging around here and having the fun of being in the real wildlife? yes. we hope so. during my time here, i have met incredible individuals fighting to protect the creatures living alongside them, desperately trying to manage the delicate balance between people and nature. rewilding the forest will take time, but it also takes care and consideration of all its inhabitants, big or small.

we've pushed so much of our wildlife into unsustainable pockets, and we've lost whole ecosystems already. climate change and our insatiable appetite for development has destroyed so many habitats, and it's up to us now to try to find ways to recreate them. what they're doing here in turkey is ambitious, but if it works, hopefully it will be an inspiration for other projects around the world.

hello. the weather is likely to cause a few problems over the next few days, for different reasons. we start off with the rain we've seeing over recent days causing the problems with flooding that we've seen across parts of england and wales, roads turning into rivers in places. we've seen some disruption on the railways across the south of wales as well. and with flood warnings continuing to be in force into friday, well, expect further disruption. i think the main message is check before heading out on any lengthy journeys. now, looking at the satellite picture, this was the cloud that brought that heavy rain across england and wales during thursday, but our next area of concern is this area of low pressure that's developing just off the coast of the united states, that's going to come through on friday night. friday itself, still a blustery kind of day, a day of sunny spells and passing showers, but some heavier rain working into western areas of scotland and north—west england for a time. temperatures still on the mild side, 11 degrees celsius across parts of southern england, southern wales, that's about four degrees above average

for this stage of january. it's friday night that we see that area of low pressure that i showed you push this big pulse of heavy rain across england and wales, the rain working across areas that already have flood warnings in force, so, you can imagine the flooding is likely to get worse for some communities before it gets better, as we head into this weekend. now, this weekend weather—wise, it is an improving picture, to a degrees, the worst of the rain will clear through, but it will be followed by blustery showers, with the weather gradually turning colder through the weekend. saturday, then, rain to start off with, risk of flooding. then comes a zone of stronger winds, with some blustery showers working into northern ireland, across parts of scotland, north—west england, too. still mild across the south—east, 12 degrees in london, but we're starting to see the air turning a bit colder across northern scotland, and indeed, that continues to be the trend into sunday. it's a day of sunny spells and passing showers, but those showers increasingly turning to snow across northern scotland, where the air continues

to get colder as the winds switch round more to a north, north—westerly direction. and as we head through the afternoon, there will be parts of scotland where temperatures struggle to get much above freezing. a sign of things to come, for sure, because as we head into next week, we've got much colder weather conditions on the way, and those colder, north, north—westerly winds will bring quite a few snow showers, even pushing all the way down to sea level. now, there is still some uncertainties in the forecast, but what we know about next week, much colder weather is on the way. we will get widespread frosts, with some icy patches to watch out for, and we are going to see snow showers coming all the way down to those low elevations, but some places will miss out, for example, across central and central—southern england on monday. that would be a favoured place for staying dry and sunny, but even if you stay fine and sunny, whatever, it is going to be cold, with temperatures much, much lower than they've been over recent days. now, the real uncertainty builds on tuesday. 0ne scenario is we have quite a weak area of low pressure that could bring falls of inland snow,

showers, really, but there could be some accumulations in places, but another more threatening scenario, probably a less likely scenario, is that we see a more developed area of low pressure. that could bring a zone of much stronger winds, but also the risk of some heavy, disruptive snowfall. i must emphasise, there is a lot of uncertainty about that kind of weather picture, but clearly it's something we'll be watching very carefully over the next few days. join me tomorrow, i'll take another look.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines. president biden faces tough questions from reporters, after a second set of classified records are found — this time in his garage. classified materials . next to your corvette — what were you thinking? hey it's in a lock garage so it's not_ hey it's in a lock garage so it's not like to sitting the street _ as more storms are forecast to hit california, the human cost of the floods become apparent. i saw him face up. he was floating face up. it is hard to process. ukraine says heavy fighting with russian forces is continuing in the eastern town of soledar — with a senior defence official saying the situation there was "difficult".