Horned Marsupial Frog Rediscovered in Ecuador

December 4, 2018 erinwilligan

Marsupial Horned Frog, recently rediscovered in Ecuador's Tumbes-Choco biodiversity hotspot

December 4, 2018

HORNED MARSUPIAL FROG REDISCOVERED IN ECUADOR

There is nothing more rewarding than learning that a species thought to be extinct has managed to somehow survive against formidable odds. The horned marsupial frog (Gastrotheca cornuta) is one such species.

Horned marsupial frogs are unique among amphibians. Named for the leaf-like horns on the top of their head and for the pouch on the female’s back to gestate tadpoles, they live in the rainforest canopy. The male’s call, like the pop of a champagne cork, celebrates the mating season. Males fertilize eggs externally and place them in the female’s pouch. Here the developing tadpoles, with umbrella-like gills, eventually emerge as tiny frogs, without a having free-swimming phase.

Once having ranged from Costa Rica to Ecuador, their numbers have steadily dwindled as their habitat has been polluted and destroyed by commercial interests. Finally disappearing from sight in Ecuador in 2005, this reclusive amphibian was presumed to have succumbed to deforestation, the lethal chytrid fungus, agricultural pesticides, and crop fumigation.

It turns out that we haven’t lost them yet. A small population of horned marsupial frogs was able to survive in a remote area of the Choco rainforest. A team of scientists recently discovered six individuals and heard more vocalizing on a parcel of land our local partner acquire earlier this year. As the research continues, we hope to learn more about these survivors, as well as other isolated species taking refuge here.

The property is now protected as part of our broader vision to prevent large-scale commercial logging and oil palm plantations from intruding farther into what remains of this richly diverse tropical forest.

Western Ecuador ranks among the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world. The most threatened habitat is the lowland Chocó rainforest, which almost rivals the Amazon in terms of biodiversity but far surpasses it in terms of endemism and of course deforestation. The Chocó has more endemic birds than any other region in the world; it also harbors >2,250 endemic species of plants.

Having already lost nearly 98 percent of the original forest, the Ecuadorian Choco is facing the highest rate of deforestation in the country. We are currently developing an ambitious strategy to establish a mosaic of strictly protected reserves by building wildlife corridors that connect, protect, and restore disjointed forests.

Help us save the last 2% of the Ecuadorian Choco for the horned marsupial frog and thousands of other endemic species.

Categories: Amphibians, Ecuador, News, Saving Nature Collection

Saving Nature In China

November 20, 2018 Stuart Pimm

November 20, 2018

by Stuart Pimm

Saving Nature in China

I’ve just spent three weeks in China — my second visit this year. It’s part of an overall commitment to conserving China’s biodiversity that now accounts for a month to six weeks every year of my time.

Why China?

Well, in large part it’s because China is so important for its exceptional biodiversity. China holds 15% of the world’s vertebrate and 12% of its plant species. Its ecosystems range from permanent ice fields to tropical moist forests. Importantly, it is becoming an international leader.

The International Convention of Biological Diversity’s Aichi targets specify quantitative targets for areas protected (target 11), stopping loss of natural habitats (target 5), and the extinction of threatened species (target 12), while underscoring the vital importance of the ecosystem services natural ecosystems provide (target 14). In 2020, China will host the Convention’s 15th Conference of Parties. Under President Xi, improving the environment has become a national priority.

China is also looking outward, to developing infrastructure across Asia and particularly Southeast Asia. One of my reasons for being in China was to attend a conference, organised in part by Professor Binbin Li, a former Ph.D student of mine and now an assistant professor at Duke University Kunshan.

Binbin and I have published key papers on identifying which areas of China are important for biodiversity. In particular, we have examined to what extent protecting giant pandas protects other species and also what places are important for species across Southeast Asia (Saving Nature Vice President, Dr. Clinton Jenkins, was a co-author of the latter paper, too.) There’s a lot we can do as conservation professionals to help our Chinese colleagues. I have seven papers in giant pandas (and many others on other issues) because I’ve been able to help with analyses and structuring conservation work using skills and experiences I’ve developed elsewhere.

Is there an Important Role for Saving Nature in All This?

Well, yes, but it’s a distant vision. The Saving Nature model helps local conservation groups buy and restore land to reconnect isolated landscapes. We take this approach because almost all the key places for threatened species are in fragmented landscapes. It’s a niche, of course, but one we fill very successfully. We can’t buy land in China, but the model of reconnecting habitat fragments applies there as is does elsewhere. So, we’re talking with our Professor Li and other colleagues about how to apply our approaches there.

Finally, mitigating the effects of the infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative will require understanding where these projects intersect key areas for biodiversity. Identifying them — and looking for ways to minimise their harm to biodiversity— has to be a first step. So, no, we aren’t building habitat corridors in China yet. But keep watching this space.

Categories: China, Saving Nature Collection

Lessons in Camera Trapping

October 26, 2018 erinwilligan

October 26, 2018

by Bridgette Keane

LESSONS IN CAMERA TRAPPING

As a student at Duke University, I worked with Dr. Stuart Pimm during the spring to plan a trip to monitor protected areas in Ecuador and Colombia that his organization is working to connect and restore. As part of the “camera trap team,” I spent a semester familiarizing myself with the use of camera traps for conservation work. This involved skimming dozens of scientific articles and reviewing different camera trap models from outdoor retail websites.

Once I arrived in the field, I realized that you can only learn so much from websites and articles. I was lucky to have received advice from Dr. Jim Sanderson about how to set-up camera traps. His guidance helped reduce the amount of troubleshooting we needed to conduct in the field.

We visited two project locations, starting with the Jama Coaque Reserve, run by the Third Millennium Alliance. We then travelled to La Mesenia in the Colombian Western Andes, run the The Hummingbird Conservancy for our second installation.

Navigating the Owner’s Manual

We spent the first few days at Jama Coaque placing traps on nearby trails to evaluate various camera settings. Basic recording options included pictures, videos, or both – but there was so much more to consider.

Other settings included image/video format and size, LED control (how many LEDs you want to go o for night images), motion sensor level (how sensitive you want the sensor to be set to), and the time interval between pictures (how long you want the camera to wait before it takes another picture/video if it is being triggered many times in a row).

Setting Our Traps

Once we actually started positioning cameras in the field, I quickly discovered that there was much more to think about than just the camera settings, as Jim Sanderson had warned me. First of all, I was not familiar with the reserve. I came in with an idea of a placement pattern for monitoring the corridor. Once there, I realized that placing the traps depended much more on the trails and in some cases, security issues.

I had to do my best to crawl my way through game trails, scouting locations in the path of animals, but away from people. I carried a machete to clear any vines or branches along the trails near the camera. Anything moving in the wind in front of the camera may inadvertently trigger it.

Finding the right spot was just one of the many challenges to placing camera traps. My days in the field usually involved hiking for hours up steep hillsides to a predetermined GPS location. Once there, I spent another hour finding the right tree, clearing the area, and positioning the camera. (Picture me jamming sticks behind it to get the perfect angle and checking the line of sight by squatting in front of it, resulting in some wonderful photos).

Unexpected Discoveries

As we learned the in’s and out’s of camera trapping, we start rethinking the technology’s possibilities. In the short-term we simply wanted to understand what species are using wildlife corridors in various stages of renewal. For the Jama Coaque Reserve, it was especially important to monitor areas of forest that were newly restored.

We were beyond thrilled to find ample movement of various species through very young forest in just the two weeks that we spent at the site. The most surprising and exciting discovery was a video of an ocelot moving through forest that was open cattle pasture just a few years ago.

Our two week stay at the reserve at La Mesenia, Colombia was even more challenging from a terrain perspective. The hikes were steeper, longer, and much more treacherous. They often took an entire day and needed to be planned out with and led by one of the reserve’s local rangers. In the short time we had at the reserve, it was simply too difficult to check them. However, our partners will be checking the cameras regularly to make sure they are running properly and will hopefully find some quality videos!

A View From the Canopy

For long-term research, the camera trapping project in Jama Coaque will next extend into the canopy. The idea is to record pictures and videos of animals that rarely come down to the ground. The research team will also pair each canopy trap with one on the ground. This protocol for corridor monitoring transcends the typical limits of camera traps by expanding camera placement to include a vertical dimension. As a result, we’ll have a more complete picture of how the entire forest is being used.

Ongoing Research

The team in La Mesenia is also shaping a long-term plan to monitor species moving through the corridor. As we collect date over the long-term, we will better understand what species use the corridors as they mature. These insights will help conservation scientists understand how to best reverse the dynamics of forest fragmentation and help species have access to the resources they need.

Please support our research into the science of wildlife corridors and species recovery. Your support helps mentor young scientists.

Categories: Camera Trapping, Ecuador, Research, Saving Nature Collection

How Can I Teach High School Students the Carbon Cycle?

September 15, 2018 Stuart Pimm

September 14, 2018

Stuart Pimm

Teaching children about the carbon cycle doesn’t have to be confusing. Once they understand the relationship between trees and climate change, they can be climate change ambassadors to friends and family. Here’s an exercise that Saving Nature’s President Stuart Pimm does with high school students.

HOW CAN I TEACH MY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT THE CARBON CYCLE?

Because it’s a science class, Pimm starts with two key facts. He’ll be talking about tons of carbon — and burning one ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide. Second, he’ll be using the metric system.

How much does a tree weigh?

No one answers.

“Imagine a tree as a cylinder. The volume of a cylinder is its area — that’s pi r squared” — the class groans — “times its length” — more groans. But that’s the hard part.

Quickly, students estimate that a good-sized tree in the forests of eastern North America has a diameter of about one metre (so about three feet) and maybe ten metres (about thirty feet) tall. The volume comes to 7.85 cubic metres.

How heavy is wood is easy!” Pimm tells them.

Pimm reminds them of Archimedes and bath tubs.

“Put a stick in water, keep it upright, and notice that about 70% of it is underwater. That’s the specific gravity of wood.”

A cubic metre of water weighs a ton, so the tree weighs about 70% of that, and 70% of 7.85 is 5.5 tons.

How much of wood is carbon?

“Well weigh a piece, dry it, then burn it: the carbon has burned off as carbon dioxide.”

The answer is that wood is about half carbon — and so that one tree is 2.75 tons of carbon.

The class goes outside and measures how many trees of different sizes there are in an area of forest. Trees are not perfect cylinders, of course, but this simple exercise teaches some basic algebra and physics — which high school teachers love, even as their students groan. It also gets the students excited about how to improve the estimates, including how to estimate the height of a tree. (Simple algebra too, using the tool on the iPhone that estimates angles.)

Scaling up one tree to estimate carbon emissions from deforestation

The class comes back inside. There are good data online that show how much forests shrink each year. Look at satellite images on Google Earth that show that many forests are being cleared by burning them.

In an afternoon’s class, one can get sensible, if rough, estimates of the planet’s most important land-use change and of how much it contributes to the increase in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Certainly, these exercises make other important points. To do them correctly, one needs to spend a lot of effort in a lot of places to estimate the full range of values expected and how they vary across Earth’s different ecosystems. (The methods suggested here wouldn’t work well outside of Phoenix, Arizona, for example.)

When one has those values, then scientists can work out how best to predict them — from data obtained from satellite imagery, for example. Green places in the Eastern USA have more carbon than the desert southwest. But no satellite can save the hot, steamy, hard work of measuring trees! That’s fundamental

Putting Knowledge into Action

At Saving Nature, our work to reforest areas high in biodiversity solves two most pressing environmental problems the world faces—mass species extinction and global warming—at the same time!

We invite you to join us in this ambitious effort! Donating to Saving Nature puts trees in the ground for biodiversity, and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere.

Categories: Climate Change, Saving Nature Collection, Science Corner

Protecting 20% of Land to Save Two-Thirds of Plant Species

September 5, 2013 erinwilligan

September 5, 2013

You’ve heard the adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But new research by Saving Nature scientists offers an amazing conservation ‘deal’. Backed up by top-flight science and data, it’s too good to pass up. So what is the deal? The new paper, published today in Science, was co-authored by Saving Nature founder Stuart Pimm and Vice President Clinton Jenkins, and by Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research, who completed his Ph.D. with Pimm.

PROTECTING A FIFTH OF THE WORLD'S LAND TO SAVE TWO-THIRDS OF ALL PLANT SPECIES

The key finding of the paper is that protecting a fifth of the world’s land area will save two-thirds of the world’s endemic plant species. Using the Kew Gardens plant database, the authors looked at the geographical distributions of 110,000 plant species. From this analysis, the researchers identified the smallest set of regions that contain the largest number of plant species.

They discovered that nearly two-thirds of the world’s plants occur in just 17 percent of the world’s land. The bad news is that less than a sixth of that 17 percent is currently protected. “Our study identifies regions of importance. The logical – and very challenging – next step will be to make tactical local decisions within those regions to secure the most critical land for conservation.” Pimm said.

Incorporating years of data, Jenkins created a detailed, color-coded map of Earth. The map illustrates where endemic plants are concentrated. This information helps conservation ecologists, policy makers, and economists to prioritize locations for conservation eorts. Because of ecological food webs, protecting endemic plants not only helps save rare plant species—it helps save dependent species, such as specialist herbivores, epiphytes and so on. “We also mapped small-ranged birds, mammals and amphibians, and found that they are broadly in the same places we show to be priorities for plants,” said Jenkins. “So preserving these lands for plants will benefit many animals, too,” he said.

According to Pimm, to achieve biodiversity conservation goals, the world needs to protect more land than we currently do and much more in key places such as Madagascar, Colombia, and coastal Brazil. These are all places where Saving Nature works.

Saving Nature relies on cutting-edge science to make its conservation decisions. With the limited amount of conservation funding available, we must use the best science to maximize the number of threatened species of wildlife and plants we can save. The report’s findings truly oer conservationists a great deal.

SCIENTIFIC NOTE: The work in Science focused on endemic species of plants. Endemic species exist only in specific places, such as a particular mountain range or forest. Endemic species are typically very rare, because of their limited geographical distribution. Endemic plants are also crucial to ecosystems that support other endangered species and, more broadly, biodiversity. Because they exist only in one place, endemic plants are often hosts for other endemic species that depend on them—insects, animals, and even other plants such as epiphytes.

Categories: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science, Science Corner, Sumatra

Data Shows Limited Recovery for Hawaiian Sea Turtle

May 26, 2013 Stuart Pimm

Two green turtles basking. Courtesy Mark Sully, NOAA/NMFS Hawaii Monk Seal Research Program. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

May 26, 2013

By Stuart Pimm

Historical Data Suggests Hawaiian Sea Turtle Recovery is Limited

Hawaii is famous for its tranquil beaches, surfing, and for pairing pineapple with pizza. But it is Hawaii’s green sea turtles that are one of the most popular tourist draws today.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists trek to Oahu’s North Shore every year to see these creatures haul out of the ocean to bask on the sand under the tropical sun.

The turtles seem so numerous today it is easy to forget that only a few decades ago most feared their extinction. The population had been harvested for food – like fish – by local residents and for a commercial fishery that targeted turtles. All harvests were banned in 1978, however, and surveys by NOAA scientists have documented a steady increase in nesting at one rookery ever since.

As a result of this rebound, some have called for the species to be removed from federal protection, de-listed as a threatened species, and for harvests to reopen.

A new study published in the journal Ecography, however, demonstrates that 80% of the historically major nesting sites for the population are extirpated or dramatically reduced and shows how this concentrates the risks posed by climate change.

The authors of this synthesis represented a diverse collaboration of ecologists, geographers, and historians – in what’s become known as the discipline of historical ecology.

Historical ecology is deceivingly simple.

Modern scientific data are chronologically limited, forcing scientists to look at proxies such as ice cores, sediments, or tree rings for long-term data sets. In historical ecology, researchers mine historical records for any information on the abundance, distribution, or demographics of wild populations.

Art, restaurant menus, ethnography, newspaper articles, and naval journals have all shown to be rich sources of information for species as diverse as Atlantic cod, African rhinos – and Hawaiian sea turtles.

I think most ecologists are fascinated by the idea of historical ecology. Who wouldn’t want to travel centuries back in time and see wild nature?” said study author Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, who leads NOAA’s Marine Turtle Assessment Program, based in Honolulu.

The question with historical observations has always been how they might be organized to inform conservation management today.”

Gaining Insights Before Exploitation

To answer that question, Dr. Van Houtan and his team scoured historical information in a host of museums, libraries, and Internet databases like Google Books and Project Gutenberg. They were rewarded with hundreds of historical accounts of sea turtles in Hawaii.

In Hawaii today, more than 90% of the green turtles nest on a low-lying coral atoll in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. However the study found nesting was significant and widespread across Hawaii, even a major nesting area on the island of Lanai that was hunted to oblivion shortly after World War I.

This historical perspective this study provides is important then for context for the recent decades. Many species on the U.S. Endangered Species Act were listed there in the 1970s, when their populations were at all-time historical low points.

According to Dr. Van Houtan, “the unprecedented modern population bottlenecks probably are not the basis for setting recovery targets, healthy populations are. This is where historical data are useful – to give insights before exploitation.”

The study appeared this week in the Early View at the journal Ecography. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00245.x/abstract

Categories: Hawaii, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science

Oil and Gas Can Coexist with a Thriving Amazon

May 16, 2013 Stuart Pimm

May 16, 2013

by Stuart Pimm

Oil and Gas Development Does Not have to Destroy the Amazon

When one thinks of the Amazon, it is usually of lush rainforests or indigenous people living amongst a wild landscape. Certainly, that is part of the Amazon’s story, but there is more, some of which may be a surprise. There is a good chance that the Amazon also produced the gasoline that powered your car today. The vast forest holds not just biological and cultural riches, but also hydrocarbon riches. The font line of the conflict between a wilderness wonderland and the modern petrochemical age is the western Amazon, one of the most biologically and culturally diverse zones on Earth.

A Framework of Best Practices for Hydrocarbon Development in the Amazon

Now a new scientific study by NGS grantees Clinton Jenkins and Matt Finer, along with engineering expert Bill Powers of E-Tech International, proposes a 10-point framework of best-practices for hydrocarbon development in the Amazon.

By combining advanced engineering criteria with consideration of ecological and social concerns, they present solutions for reducing the many potential impacts of hydrocarbon development.

For example, by using extended reach drilling (ERD), a technique to reach a larger subsurface area from a single drilling location, it is possible to greatly reduce the total number of needed drilling platforms as well as access roads for a given project, says Clinton Jenkins of North Carolina State University.

Using ERD along with other key components of best practice, such as reduced pipeline right-of-way and a prohibition on new access roads, could reduce project-related deforestation by more than 75 percent.

Avoiding Conflicts

According to Clinton Jenkins, it is not just better engineering that can prevent problems. The vast majority of currently planned drilling wells, production platforms and pipeline routes overlap sensitive areas such as protected areas, indigenous territories, critical ecosystems and vital watersheds. By identifying these types of potentially conflictive overlaps early in the planning process, best practice can be essential to avoiding future conflicts.

While the findings in this study will be applicable across the Amazon, the direct focus is the department of Loreto, a vast Amazonian region in northern Peru that is home to extraordinary biological and cultural diversity. Loreto recently made headlines when the Peruvian government declared an environmental state of emergency following years of extensive oil contamination.

In the words of author Dr. Matt Finer of the Center for International Environmental Law,

Loreto makes an ideal case study because it is one of the largest and most dynamic hydrocarbon zones in the Amazon. Following the state of emergency, there is an added urgency to develop methods to minimize the impacts of any future development.”

The study also concludes that utilizing best practices should not increase project costs and may actually be cheaper in the long run. According to author Bill Powers of E-Tech International, “The engineering section of the guidelines addresses the full range of key project components. In addition to greatly reducing negative impacts such as deforestation, we found that best practice does not impose substantially greater costs than a conventional project, and may in fact reduce overall costs.”

The research was funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

Categories: Peru, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science

The Search for the Grey-winged cotinga

May 30, 2011 Stuart Pimm

Clinton Jenkins produced this extraordinary map. It shows the State of Rio de Janeiro — the city itself is to the left of the large bay at the western end of the image. Satellite images have been draped over a 3-D rendering of the mountains. Finally, Clinton colour-coded the areas with forest high enough to be possible habitat for the grey-winged cotinga. It was known from only two sites — those labelled. Surely, we could find it in some of the other possibilities show in light blue!

May 30, 2011

by Stuart Pimm

Not all National Geographic expeditions go smoothly.

All adventures end at precisely the same point. Thirty seconds into the hot shower, a stream of dirty water runs down the drain. It takes with it the mud and dried blood, changing skin color from blotchy grey to pink, uncovers the until-now forgotten scrapes and cuts, and exterminates the thriving ecosystem of bacteria and fungi, each with its own distinct and pungent smell, to which my skin had been playing host.

This is exactly when one has the first dangerous notion that the last days or weeks might have been fun.

This expedition to remote and unexplored Brazilian mountaintops to lookfor one of the world’s rarest birds was born in my comfortable, air-conditioned laboratory. Professor Maria Alice dos Santos Alves of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I are sitting in front of a large computer monitor. On screen is a satellite image of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Overlaying other information, the computer tells us is that one of the biologically richest areas of the planet has been barely explored.

Someone has to go — not “because it’s there” — but precisely because in short order it may not be. This is one of the most damaged and threatened ecosystems on Earth. Within days, Maria Alice prepares her grant proposal to the National Geographic Society’s Committee on Research and Exploration.

Within the year, she, her graduate student, Alline Storni, and I are stuck in remote cloud forest, abandoned by our helicopter pilot. We have noodles, tea, and trail bars for another two days and no idea what is the best path, if any, to take us out. Any path has to be one we cut ourselves.

The rainforests along the Atlantic coast of Brazil team with species found nowhere else on Earth. Some 8000 species of flowering plant, 200 species of birds and no one knows how many insects and fungi, are unique to these forests. Less than 6% of the forests remain.

This is the front line of conservation.

Maria Alice and her colleagues must provide Brazilian State and Federal agencies with the best possible advice to prevent extinctions. She is spending a sabbatical at Duke University, working with Clinton Jenkins, one of my research group.

Using satellite images, data on elevation, and a broad knowledge of where bird species occur, they’ll produce detailed predictions of where are the richest and most vulnerable parts of the Atlantic Forest.

The computer predictions find that generally different species of birds have been collected where the computer thinks they should be and not where they shouldn’t. Maria Alice and Clinton point to the glaring exception. The grey-winged cotinga, discovered in 1980 by Michael Brooke, has been found on only two mountaintops. Along a hundred mile ridge of mountains inland of Rio de Janeiro, others areas of high elevation forest should also be home to this species.

There are no records — of this or any other species. Is the grey-winged cotinga more widespread — and so perhaps less threatened – than we thought? What other species occur here? What is happening to these forests? This is biological terra incognito — as exciting to us as those large blanks on the maps were to geographical explorers of the 19th century.

August 2003 and I’m in Rio for a brief visit. Unexpectedly, the State government provides a helicopter for a day. Its two pilots quiz Maria Alice about her work, then become enthusiastic supporters. They give their day to fly us along the mountain chain from Serra do Tinguá in the west to Desengano in the east.

It’s brilliantly sunny, with puffy white clouds for dramatic effect. We have a great day, with unrivalled views of the forests even if Alline does look a little green. Helicopter rides are particularly unnerving when the land falls away several thousand feet in a second as the helicopter crosses a ridgeline.

Three eastern mountaintops are visible from the city of Rio itself; Tinguá is the closest and so inaccessible that our pilots cannot find a place to land. They can at Araras, the next site, and east of Três Picos — three giant, sheer-sided pillars of granite rising several thousand feet from the forest below.

We work eastwards, preparing for the exploration that will begin in December — mid-summer in the southern hemisphere. We land, check the safety of each landing place, and record it to the nearest yard on our GPS. Unbroken forest stretches for miles, but we also see the encroachment of farms that reduce the forest to tiny fragments, ones we know will be too small to support many of the original, unique and likely unknown species.

Into the mountains…

Friday, December 5th, 2003. We lunch improbably in a luxurious home on the Fazenda Itatiba high in a valley a few miles from our intended camp. “It won’t be like this when we get to camp!” we joke with the fazenda’s administrator, Argélio.

The helicopter cannot carry everything we need in one trip, but will ferry the team and equipment in short trips between the fazenda and the camp. We’ve hired a private company this time. I just wish its pilot wasn’t wearing shiny black shoes, pressed black trousers and a white, starched shirt with epaulettes that vaguely suggest a naval uniform.

I fly on helicopter surveys across the world each year. Most pilots wear fatigues or tattered shorts, repudiate fashion, and have flight helmets that sport small insignia that hint of a previous life (“Da Nang”, for example) that one never brings up in conversation.

There’s a break in the clouds and I’m off. Knowing the risks, I ensure that my tent, pack, water bottle, and the remains of last night’s pizza are with me.

As we cross into the next valley, the clouds break. Over the landing spot, it’s bright sunshine. The pilot doesn’t land and circles around. I jab my finger energetically at the flat area of grass and smooth rocks on which we had landed in August.

As we land, I know from experience that he should keep the engine running, holding the helicopter under power in case it slips. He reduces power and I prepare to get out. He signals me to stay inside it. OK, I understand that rule: he wants to shut down completely.

Hell no, he then gets out. If wind tips the helicopter, the still rotating blades will hit the ground and the resulting shrapnel will turn me into hamburger. I get out, grab my gear and move well away from the helicopter. I notice I’ve a companion, a worker from the fazenda. In a minute, the pilot is off.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s back in our valley, but isn’t coming this way. He lands a mile or more below us in a depression. We wave. We strip off our shirts and wave them. Through the binoculars, I watch Alline and Maria Alice unload gear and the helicopter leaves. We will never see it again.

A silence descends. I slap on the sunscreen; I had the good sense to pack. My companion calls Maria Alice on our radio. “I told at the pilot it wasn’t the right place, but he said your site was not safe,” she tells me.”

So, why didn’t he then come to fetch us?” I ask. “I screamed at him that he had to. He ignored me and left.”

“Well,” I reply, “you have too much stuff to walk up to us, we’ll have to come to you.”

“Your companion is called Gilmar” Maria Alice tells me. He wasn’t expecting to stay and has nothing but the clothes he’s wearing. And he didn’t bring any food.

Between us, we can just manage to pick everything up. It takes us three hours to reach Maria Alice and Alline. By that time, the sun has turned to rain and we’re sodden. The route is partly a bog filled with tussock grass six feet tall. A few yards takes us five minutes — and another five to get our breath back. We head for a low forest, only to find it’s a tangled thicket of bushes and bamboo.

The only practical solution is to park the gear and cut a trail with the machete, then come back for the gear, and repeat the process. We’ll have to make “the hole” our camp and explore from there. It would take three trips to get to our planned destination with all our gear — at best, a long and exhausting day.

Maria Alice has already set up our mist nets. The nets catch small birds as they fly between the trees. My job is to listen for the grey-winged cotinga, to play a tape of its song to entice it to respond, and to record songs of birds we do not recognize.

We set up tents in the rain, glad we have a third for Gilmar. The final insult is the gas stove doesn’t work. As one attaches the burner, it’s supposed to puncture the canister through a rubber seal. It doesn’t. The prospect of cold food for two days sinks in. Out comes a pocketknife, we puncture the canister, and screw on the burner quickly before all the gas escapes.

Hot noodles taste so good in the field.

Saturday, December 6th starts cold and misty, then variously fogs, drizzles, sheets, spots, torrents, and all the other forms of rain for which we Britons have so many names. We band birds and listen for songs. Gilmar cuts a trail up the hillside to our north — the direction of “home,” the fazenda. “Just in case something goes wrong,” we tell ourselves.

What I hear on the trail is not encouraging. Scientists know almost nothing about the grey-winged cotinga. It’s supposed to live just below the tree line — just where we are. It’s the other fact worries me.

The bird is supposed to occupy forest at a higher elevation than its closest relative, the black and gold cotinga. The latter’s song is one of the extraordinary sounds of the Brazilian mountains — a pure whistle several seconds long, that rises mid—point to half a note higher. The altimeter says we should be too high for it. It’s so common here that the overlapping whistles create a continuous dissonance.

I return, soaked. As evening draws in, we’re all too cold to eat outside, so we eat inside my tent. Dinner is a protracted affair, hot noodles, soup, trail bars, nuts, chocolate, dry fruit, hot chocolate to drink. We’re all in our sleeping bags to keep warm, our wet clothes piled up around us.

Tomorrow night we’ll be warm again, back at fazenda in the next valley, where the owner’s generosity has extended to a night at his house.

Sunday, December 7th. I have never learned to love the sensation of getting out of a toasty, dry sleeping bag, and pulling on cold, damp rain gear, soaked socks and boots. It’s raining; I will be wetter yet within minutes. Only hard work will generate the body heat to warm the cold clothes.

By 1pm, we’re hearing our helicopter every 15 minutes, or at least think we are. None appears.

We have no radio and cell phone connections in the “hole”. Gilmar takes a radio and cell phone and heads up his rough trail. After an hour, from his perch above the forest, he can reach us by radio and the outside world by cell phone.

The pilot is still at home.

That means at least an hour to get to the helicopter in the Rio de Janeiro traffic, longer still to reach us. “I was expecting you to call me,” he tells us.

Maria Alice is furious, for we all know how clear her instructions had been and the impossibility of us calling him from where he left us.

Come in under the clouds and head up the valley from the southwest,” I ask Maria Alice to tell Gilmar to tell the pilot. The valley floor is still clear and the clouds above it are showing patches of blue sky. “If you can’t make it today, come first thing tomorrow.”

The pilot has abandoned us in a terrible place, one from which we cannot call the outside.

There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been here. If he doesn’t arrive in the morning, it will be a disaster. Even if we can walk out, we’ll have to abandon all our gear and will be lucky to carry out our cameras and sound recording equipment. At some later date, we’ll need to come back by helicopter to recover it. This could delay the expedition for days, even weeks.

What do I tell National Geographic?

Maria Alice worries. It could be a lot worse: we have food.

Monday, December 8th morning. We pack for the hike out and by 9am are on our way. My tent is left up, with our gear packed as neatly as we can inside it. When we reclaim all that we must now leave, we want to be able to load it quickly. The rain has eased a bit.

The way out is simple and daunting. We know where we are and where we want to be — to the nearest yard from our GPS. It’s not far — a few miles — it’s just that there is a very large mountain in the way. We must go around it. Is to the left or the right better? Gilmar has told us the bad news: the forest has bamboo thickets, but above the tree line is worse. There are open areas, but they are bare granite on slopes too steep to climb.

We also know that the fazenda’s elevation is 1500 feet below our camp. Climbing up the mountain between us will be hard, but also mean that we’ll have to climb down those 1500 feet — plus every extra foot we climb up along the way.

Accidents are more likely going down than going up.

By lunchtime, we’re back in camp, wet, muddy from boots to hat, and smelling of rotten vegetation. After a thousand foot climb, we get radio and phone reception. We call the pilot, who incredibly thinks that we were going to call him to let him know when to come. He flew from Rio the previous afternoon, but gone to a town ten miles away and found it to be in the clouds.

That really angers us. We’ll get a bill for a thousand dollars for a trip that didn’t come close to us at a time when the weather was good in our valley.

We also reach Argélio at the fazenda by radio — and that’s the important news. He’s coming to find us and he’s not coming the short way. He’s coming up a different valley, though quite how and where is beyond me. Something about a tractor, I’m told.

Afternoon. Gilmar and I head up the opposite side of the valley from our trail. On the steep, but just accessible, granite slopes, we see a small cleft. It opens into a spectacular valley running southwards, that joins another, even larger valley coming in from the west. At its far end is the massive granite pillar of one of the Três Picos. Beyond this valley to the south, thick, white clouds cover the lowlands east of Rio de Janeiro.

Everything we can see is forest — surely one of the largest tracts of forest left in these mountains. This is a glorious, wonderful place to be stuck!

At the valley’s end — it looks miles away and thousands of feet below us — is a bright green spot. It’s a pasture and we see three men, tiny specks even through binoculars. Gilmar is talking to them on the radio. He takes off his shirt, puts it on a stick and waves it. I take off my blue rain jacked and do likewise. How on Earth they are going see us in the middle of this mountain beats me.

We wave vigorously and, improbably, they wave back.

Perched on the granite bluff, I spend the afternoon looking across it, listening. Abundant black and golds call. We’re above an exposed ridge, where the wind stunts the trees; this is supposed to be the grey-winged’s prime habitat. If it were here, I would hear it. Clouds fall into the valley, then are swept up into the sky, and from time to time brilliant sunshine turns misty grey greens into bright patches of green, with yellow and purple flowering trees adding highlights. By 5pm, our rescuers are in shouting distance in the valley below. At 730pm, just as it gets dark, six of them enter out camp.

Tuesday, December 9th. It blew hard last night, but there was little chance I would lose my tent — it had 7 men sleeping in it. Still, the wind snapped one of my tent’s poles and it’s oddly misshapen at first light.

There’s a trail bar and a cup of tea for everyone, one lump of sugar in each cup, except mine.

That exhausts all our food, but we’re happy. To run out of food before leaving, would have been inexcusably bad form. To leave our equipment behind would have been a disaster too: we just have enough helpers to carry it out.

It’s downhill all the way, sometimes steep, sometimes through dense bamboo thickets, but mostly through forest with a closed canopy that shades the forest floor and keeps it free of undergrowth.

Every step, I’m watch my feet, careful in where I place them, and use every handhold the trees and lianas afford. This is not the place to sprain an ankle.

An hour down, I see a bright orange frog on the ground.

It’s about the size of a dime and, as I admire it, others see another, then more. There’s a colony of about a dozen of them within a few yards. Bright and conspicuous, they are advertising that it’s not a good idea to touch them. When our companions do, we warn them not to touch their eyes or lips with their fingers.

“What are they?” we ask. “Does anyone know?” While we don’t, Maria Alice’s colleague at the university is a frog specialist, and we’ll ask him. We’ve done this before elsewhere and the answer has sometimes been that no one has seen the species before.

We descend past other frog colonies, down into the valley, below where we black and gold cotingas whistle. Soon, we’re hearing bellbirds — crow—sized, white cotingas that sound like cracked bells. There are more of them than any place I’ve ever been. Their hearing so many rivals works them up into a calling frenzy.

The canopy is now far above our heads, the going more open, flatter. We come to a real trail. For the first time in days, we can stride along, rather than tentatively place each foot down. I feel warm. My clothes are drying. Three hours after we started, we’re in the open pasture we saw yesterday, looking back to where we’ve come, marveling that anyone could see us from this distance.

We hike along another trail, find another clearing, hike more, and then in the next clearing there’s a tractor. How many people can you fit on a tractor? Ten — and their equipment — is the impossible answer.

On the back of a tractor, down a narrow trail a 4×4 would not navigate, past, then around the granite domes of Três Picos, not fast, not elegant, but down and down, warmer and drier with each slow, bumpy mile until we make it out. We walk stiffly the last few yards to the hot showers.

On the beach at Ipanema.

By 7pm, we’re on the beach at Ipanema, having a beer with Michael Brooke and discussing our plans. We should be in Arraras by now, but Maria Alice will need a day to regroup, check the equipment, buy food, and most important of all, find another helicopter pilot.

I will now miss Araras, for I must leave on Friday night. My body demands I spend tomorrow soaking in a hot bath and drying my gear. Michael arrived two days ago and hasn’t come this far to watch the beach. We set our alarms for 5am.

Wednesday, December 10th. By 830am, Michael and I are slogging up a trail in Serra dos Órgãos National Park heading for where he found the grey-winged cotinga 20 years ago. It’s my only hope to see the bird now and, importantly, to see how the forest here differs from that near Três Picos. Every muscle hurts as we climb hour after hour, stopping only for me to catch my breath.

We climb up through where the black and gold cotingas are whistling, then leave them below us. We listen, straining to hear the grey-winged’s call. No such luck.

Thursday, December 11th. There’s so much excitement in Maria Alice’s apartment as we pack the food, organize and check the equipment. In an instant, they’re off, and I’m alone. I wash my gear, write my notes, check my e-mail, enjoy a beer on the beach, listen to the BBC World Service after dinner.

I wasn’t expecting a phone call. From high on the ridge at Araras, exactly where they should be, exactly where I should be, Maria Alice has excellent reception. “Wish you were!” Next morning, the phone rings again.

We have grey-winged cotingas calling all around us” she tells me. You really should be there!”

“Yes,” I think, “I really should be.”

Postscript

Maria Alice completed the work for her National Geographic Grant. It would have been impossible if she had lost all the equipment. In time, she published her work as two scientific papers:

Alves, M. A. S., S. L. Pimm, A. Storni, M. A. Raposo, M. de L. Brooke, G. Harris, A. Foster, and C. N. Jenkins. 2008. Mapping and exploring the distribution of a threatened bird, Grey-winged Cotinga. Oryx. 42, 562-566

Alves, M.A. S., C.N. Jenkins, S.L. Pimm, A. Storni, M.A. Raposo, M. de L. Brooke, G. Harris and A. Foster. 2009. Birds, Montane forest, State of Rio de Janeiro, Southeastern Brazil. Check List 5: 289-200.

On the flight in August, we had seen one possible site where we could drive up a road to see the bird. Andy Foster explored that area and found it there.

Two years after I wrote this story, I went to that site, found the bird and filmed and photographed it for the first time.

Categories: Birds, Brazil, Saving Nature Collection

Biodiversity Needs You – and your Smartphone!

May 11, 2011 Stuart Pimm

Photograph of a coastal horned lizard about to be entered into INaturalist. Photo by Ken - ichi Ueda.

May 9, 2011

by Stuart Pimm

Biodiversity Needs You and Your Smartphone

Our knowledge of biodiversity is not good. We don’t know the names of most species. For the ones that we do, we don’t know where they once lived, let alone where they live now. It’s even worse for species that are rare, for they may soon not live anywhere.

Now, armed with your iPhone and a great new app, you — and I do mean you — can change all that.

First, the prosaic details. We have over a million scientific names for animals and about 350,000 names for flowering plants. There are probably another 15% more flowering plant species waiting to be discovered.

For animals — which are mostly insects — best guesses — and I do mean guesses! — involve several million. So, the great majority are unknown.

It gets worse. We have maps of geographic ranges for only a tiny fraction of species worldwide — birds, mammals, and amphibians.

For only some countries do we have some other species. The British, living on their cold, damp sceptred isle off the continent at the very bottom of the international league table of biodiversity, seem to have maps of just about everything. “Another Eden”, according to Shakespeare; perhaps, but they don’t have many species to worry about.

How do we produce those maps? The conventional way is to go to museums, look at the specimens there, and record where they were collected.

That’s so 19^th Century!

Now, the news. All this is about to change with that 21^st Century innovation — the smart phone — and a great new project that started when Dr. Scott Loarie of the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford, in California teamed up with Ken-ichi Ueda, a software developer in Silicon Valley.

Scott also lives in Silicon Valley, spends hours in front of a computer writing code, and fills out many of the boxes on the checklist of being a nerdy techie. So you have to watch my video of him: he isn’t.

In the field, he moves from flowers to birds to lizards with an enthusiasm that is instantly infectious. I’ve never met anyone who is so passionate about the outdoors of California and few with such a wide ranging knowledge of its natural history.

“I study the impact of land use change and climate change on biodiversity.”

Holding up a coastal horned lizard, (Phrynosoma coronatum) Scott asks:

If I wanted to know where this lizard survives and where it doesn’t, I’d go to a museum and look at all the specimens collected over the last 100 years or so. It used to live in most of the chaparral around here, in the Bay Area of San Francisco.”

“But this is one of those species that is rapidly disappearing. And we’re not exactly sure why. It may be climate change. It may be changes to the ants that make up its diet. It might be the urban sprawl that is isolating its habitat.”

“We need to know exactly where this species persists. And, we need more data.”

Scott’s solution is not an army of well-funded professionals with sophisticated equipment. That isn’t going to happen. He wants you — the citizen scientist and a piece of equipment you likely already own — your iPhone. And, of course the App.

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

The simplest way to do things is to take a photo of an animal or plant, upload it to the web — at www.inaturalist.org — along with the location where you saw it.

That’s so late 20^th Century!

— not that I want to discourage you. Your smart phone, however, is technology straight from Star Trek. You point, you click, it takes a photo, it records your exact location using the build in GPS and the application uploads this to the web site.

My fellow Trekkies, will naturally sing Commander Data’s song “life forms, tiny little life forms … where are you?” while they do this.

Doing this (whether singing or not) helps with the problem as old as time — we all tend to put things off. After that long day in the field, it’s all too easy to forget. Now, you can record a species the moment you see it.

So what happens if I don’t know the name of my species, or am unsure? The world can help — putting the observation up means others can comment, help, discuss, argue, threatened duels with feather dusters at 50 paces over rival interpretations — all that kind of thing.

Bird people have many places to share their observations. It’s a great community tool, one that works well. Yes, birders make mistakes, or see something that they cannot identify, and make outrageous claims. We know so very much more about where bird species are found worldwide than we do for any other group of species, because citizen science is both nurturing and demanding.

In time, the collections of observations on iNaturalist are going to provide a unique record of where a given species lives. And with more time, we’ll understand more about how that “where” is changing.

iNaturalist also works “backwards,” too.

One can ask: what species am I likely to find on (say) Mount Diablo, in California — where I interviewed Scott?

When Scott first met Ken-ichi, iNaturalist was a social network for naturalists. Scott quickly persuaded Ken-ichi that beyond the potential of getting citizen scientists together with each other for fun was the chance to unite them with scientists to tackle one of the most pressing environmental issues of our age.

iNaturalist is intentionally subversive, in another way too. Scott told me.

What I think is so compelling about iNaturalist is that we are using these technologies — iPhones, apps — that are cutting us off from the natural world. Too often, these are keeping us indoors, narrowing our focus. Now we’re using them to get back out in nature. To the extent we can use this new tool to get people enjoying the outdoors, tuning in with the world around them, that’s a great thing!”

Categories: Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science, Technology

Exploration 101: The Dream Jobs Begin with a Slog

October 25, 2009 erinwilligan

October 25, 2009

Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm has a long and brilliant career as a scientist. Author of numerous research papers and books, he has given lectures in distinguished forums across the world. Yet he is never happier than as a teacher and mentor.

In this blog entry Pimm addresses what it takes to be a young explorer in the field, interviewing some of his protégés about the high and low points. He finds that much of the excitement and challenges of getting started have not changed over the past forty years. It all begins with a willingness to pay your dues.

Exploration 101: The Dream Job Begins with a Slog

By Stuart L. Pimm

Special Contributor to NatGeo News Watch

The Seven Stars is not the oldest pub in Derby, England. Nearby, the Dophin dates from 1580–a hundred years earlier. But in the late 1960s, the Seven Stars served draft Newcastle Brown ale. It was worth hitchhiking home to Derby from Oxford at the weekend. Beer in the south of England was terrible.

As I elbowed my way to the bar, a vaguely familiar face introduced himself, a conversation ensued, and seven months later, I drove with him and ten others overland to Afghanistan.

My career as an explorer had begun.

That it almost ended that summer–I came back so sick that I had to miss a year of university–is another story.

The story I write here is how one starts a career in exploration–and in this century, rather than in the last one, when I started mine.

So I turned to three remarkable young explorers: Dr. Luke Dollar is a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer–and a former student of mine. The other two are undergraduates at Duke–Varsha Vijay and Ciara Wirth.

“How did you get started,” I asked them.

Luke was first. “I spent three years cleaning up lemur poop at the Duke Lemur Center. I ingratiated myself in every way with Professor Patricia Wright and eventually was invited to do equally menial stuff in Madagascar.” (Like me, Pat is a former member of the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.)

“I was the first up, the last down, and at the end of the day the dirtiest, most tired, most sweaty of everyone.”

From that experience, Luke returned year-after-year, working first for Pat, then on his own, with the island’s largest predator–the fossa.

Almost every year, Luke takes teams to his study sites with Earthwatch–an organization which people pay to do field research for a couple of weeks each northern summer.

Each year, Luke needs the same kind of assistance that Pat needed–someone who is prepared to start by doing the very basic stuff in the field and what is often quite numbing organization to get there.

(I remembered from the first expedition I led, how much time we spent on calculating how many rolls of toilet paper we’d need for 14 people in the field for several months. We didn’t think it would be easy to buy in Afghanistan.)

Varsha got her start helping Luke for one summer in Madagascar.

Then came Ecuador. This was a chance to work with Ciara Wirth, other students from Duke, and Save America’s Forests. Varsha did not hesitate.

Ciara and Varsha worked with Waorani Indians in a remote part of the Amazon.

I told them: “You fly to Quito, then fly across the Andes into the Amazon lowlands, then take a bus for a day — or longer if it gets stuck in the mud — then two days by canoe.”

“Madagascar, the Amazon … two of the most amazing places on Earth! How could I say no?” Varsha replied. And after the first summer there, she took a year off from Duke to continue her work in the field. Ciara came back for a second summer too.

“What were the high points and what were the low points?” I asked them.

“Food”–was near the top of Varsha’s list. ”Growing up in a Hindu family, we did not eat meat. Going from that to eating monkey parts and every kind of rodent was a challenge.”

And the language. Ciara had traveled extensively with her very adventurous parents and spoke Spanish. Varsha did not. Remarkably, both have learned the language of the Woarani Indians.

Initially, they did so in a remarkable way–by talking over Skype in the evenings whenever their Woarani guide, Manuela, came into Puyo and would log onto the computer in an Internet café. The transition from rain forest nomad to using the latest communications technology happens within a generation.

“How did you make friends?”

Varsha’s story was that she regularly joined the women in the traditional villages in making chica–manioc “beer.” “You chew the manioc for a few minutes, spit it back into the bowl, grab another mouthful, and start chewing again.” And yes, it’s a communal bowl.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

“So what went wrong?” All of us have stories of bad experiences.

Ciara’s project depending on mapping–and the essential tools were the GPS units she had taken with her. She left them in a taxi–threatening the viability of the entire project.

After a frantic night and a visit to the police station–” a scary place at night”–they found the taxi and within hours were on their way.

When they arrived, “it was one of the greatest experiences Varhsa and I had the entire summer–a really beautiful community,” Ciara said.

Through all the challenges, all the things that go wrong, Luke and Varsha were all excited about going back into the field. And Ciara is there now, working in Africa.

Luke’s final advice: “Keep your mind open–and be prepared for anything.”

Categories: Madagascar, Saving Nature Collection

HORNED MARSUPIAL FROG REDISCOVERED IN ECUADOR

Saving Nature in China

Why China?

Is there an Important Role for Saving Nature in All This?

LESSONS IN CAMERA TRAPPING

Navigating the Owner’s Manual

Setting Our Traps

Unexpected Discoveries

A View From the Canopy

Ongoing Research

HOW CAN I TEACH MY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT THE CARBON CYCLE?

How much does a tree weigh?

How heavy is wood is easy!” Pimm tells them.

How much of wood is carbon?

Scaling up one tree to estimate carbon emissions from deforestation

Putting Knowledge into Action

PROTECTING A FIFTH OF THE WORLD'S LAND TO SAVE TWO-THIRDS OF ALL PLANT SPECIES

Historical Data Suggests Hawaiian Sea Turtle Recovery is Limited

Historical ecology is deceivingly simple.

The question with historical observations has always been how they might be organized to inform conservation management today.”

Gaining Insights Before Exploitation

Oil and Gas Development Does Not have to Destroy the Amazon

A Framework of Best Practices for Hydrocarbon Development in the Amazon

Avoiding Conflicts

Not all National Geographic expeditions go smoothly.

This is the front line of conservation.

Into the mountains…

Hot noodles taste so good in the field.

What do I tell National Geographic?

Accidents are more likely going down than going up.

An hour down, I see a bright orange frog on the ground.

On the beach at Ipanema.

Postscript

Biodiversity Needs You and Your Smartphone

Now, armed with your iPhone and a great new app, you — and I do mean you — can change all that.

That’s so 19th Century!

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

That’s so late 20th Century!

iNaturalist also works “backwards,” too.

Exploration 101: The Dream Job Begins with a Slog

Help Us Have a Bigger Impact

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That’s so 19^th Century!

That’s so late 20^th Century!