CUTTING-EDGE CONSERVATION

Last November, when most of us were savoring a piece of pumpkin pie, Lesley de Souza and Nigel Pitman could only dream of a home-cooked meal. Conservation scientists with Chicago’s famed Field Museum, the Evanston couple was deep in Guyana’s rainforest conducting one of the most comprehensive studies of the area’s ecological and biodiver- sity ever performed. “People spend years in a landscape doing research,” says de Souza, Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Field. “We do what are called rapid inventories, where we are in the field from three to four weeks, then come back and synthe- size the data we’ve gathered so that we can give that information quickly to governments to advance conservation in that area.”

“If you think of a typical expedition,” says Pitman, Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Field since 2013, “scientists would come back to Chicago from whatever interesting place they’d explored and study their specimens and organize their data with the goal of maybe writing an article or organizing an exhibition. The thing we want most of all to generate is conservation action. We want to convince governments that the place we just came back from is really valuable and deserves to be protected.”

The Field is one of the only natural history museums dedicated to conservation. Since 1999, its rapid inventory program has helped governments establish 17 new conservation areas in the Andes-Amazon region, comprising more than 21 million acres of forests and rivers. “Many people probably don’t realize that the Field Museum is a major player in Amazonian conservation,” suggests Pitman. “If you ask South Americans active in the conservation community who’s really a leader in providing the biodiversity science that sustains some of these protected area proposals, the answer is not the Smithsonian, it’s not the Natural History Museum in London, it’s the Field.” That perception is built on years of work in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia using a multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative approach that not only involves an international roster of experts in geology, plants, fishes, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, soils, and local ecology but also indigenous community members and local
experts. As de Souza noted in a recent statement, “The Amerindian communities know more about these areas than the foreign scientists who come to study the region’s biodiversity. Our goal is to marry these two bodies of knowledge.”

The 3 million acres targeted for conservation in Guyana represent one of the largest, uncompromised rainforests on the planet. More than 95 percent of the Guyanese territory is covered in standing forest, and the country is a world leader in protecting its forests. “We are so used to getting our information about the rainforest from gloomy newspaper articles that give the impression that the whole thing is on fire or in tatters,” observes Pitman, an expert on Amazonian trees. “We are lucky enough to go to places that remind us that that’s not the case at all. There are still vast, vast areas of the Amazon that are in incredibly good shape. This 3-million-acre patch in Guyana is one of them, incredibly wild and intact, untouched forest to the horizon in every direction.”

Nonetheless, as Pitman notes, “Conservation biology is a crisis discipline,” and scientists compete with oil, mining, and logging interests eager to extract what they can from unspoiled environ- ments. Plus, a change in government can send support for conservation efforts out the window. “In 2003, I was doing an inventory in northern Peru, where the idea was to create a national park,” recalls Pitman. “It wasn’t created until 15 years later. In those years there were lots of moments when it seemed it was about to happen and then plenty of times when the government told us there was no chance this park was going to be created. One of the strengths of our program is that it is 25 years old and growing strong. So, when we do a rapid inventory and make arguments for the protection of a place, we are prepared to make those arguments for as long as it takes to get that area protected.”