President John McCarter of the Field Museum loves to see photographs of the far-flung expeditions his institution sends out across the world, but he is especially partial to a satellite shot of the Amazon rain forest along the border between Brazil and Bolivia.
The boundary is easy to spot. On the Brazilian side, the landscape is ragged and torn apart where loggers have built roads and cut into what once were hundreds of miles of continuous wilderness.
In Bolivia, the rain forest is still pristine and intact, a solid green carpet of densely packed trees, off-limits to logging, farming, ranching, mining or any sort of development.
An elite unit of Field Museum scientists has worked hard to protect the Bolivian side, cooperating with officials to see that portions of it are declared protected biodiversity zones.
The museum has achieved significant success with this kind of work, which McCarter calls “science-based advocacy.” Using a process known as Rapid Biological Inventory, in which experts survey vulnerable areas and highlight what would be lost if they were developed, the museum to date has helped win protective measures for 40,000 square miles of wilderness.
“That is a very considerable accomplishment,” said John Terborgh, a Duke University biologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on Neotropical ecology. “There isn’t a Nobel Prize in conservation, but the RBI team is deserving of it.”
Since the museum’s Environment, Culture and Conservation Division was formed in 1999, it has conducted 20 Rapid Biological Inventories in five nations: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Cuba and China.
First, the unit’s 30 biologists, anthropologists and logistical specialists look for big, intact wilderness areas that are threatened by human encroachment. Working with local scientists and environmentalists, they then launch an intense expedition into the wilderness to inventory every plant and animal species they encounter.
“They are really difficult undertakings,” McCarter said. “They are rigorous, done by top-notch scientists with world-class reputations. Their reports have enormous credibility when they go to local and national leaders to ask for protection for these areas.”
The team is putting together a final report on its most recent Rapid Biological Inventory, conducted in October. In a 4,000-square-mile area straddling the northern border between Peru and Ecuador, they found one of the richest biological treasures they have so far uncovered.
Both nations set aside the area years ago as a protected zone, but it was then largely forgotten. As a result of lax oversight, an oil concession now overlaps the entire protected zone in Peru.
“This is the epicenter of plant diversity,” Field Museum botanist Robin Foster said, noting its proximity to the equator, the most biologically diverse region of the world. “We spent three weeks walking around there and came out with 1,400 plant species, but we suspect there are 3,000 to 4,000 species in there in all.”
Scientists think eight to 10 of the plants found were new to science, and they located rich stands of hardwoods logged almost to extinction in the rest of the Amazon. Herpetologists found healthy numbers of black caiman, nearly extinct elsewhere. The trip’s 437 recorded bird species make the area one of the most diverse bird habitats in the world, and 184 fish species make it one of the most diverse fish habitats.
Equatorial rain forests, which generate much of the world’s rainfall, clean water and fresh air, are thought to determine global weather patterns. They are being destroyed at a rate of 50,000 square miles a year, often with the permission of Third World governments who welcome money that comes from development in wild areas. Their decisions, however, often are made without solid technical information on the environmental impact.
To supply decision-makers with accurate information, the U.S.-based environmental group Conservation International invented the rapid inventory idea in 1990, calling it the Rapid Assessment Program.
The program had some success, but after two of its scientists were killed in a plane crash in 1993 while conducting an inventory in Ecuador, Conservation International halted the program for a while.
Foster, one of the founding scientists of the effort, and Debra Moskovits, a mammal scientist who joined the Rapid Assessment Program team early on, moved to the Field Museum, and McCarter backed them in creating the Rapid Biological Inventory program.
They conducted the first Rapid Biological Inventory in the Pando region of northern Bolivia in 1999. The next year, their second inventory got international attention when they spent several weeks in Cordillera Azul, a mountainous, 5,225-square-mile region in central Peru that is larger than Connecticut but so remote few humans had ever entered it. Just nine months after the inventory, Peru declared Cordillera Azul a protected national park.
From that success bloomed 18 more Rapid Biological Inventories. Most were inside Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador’s Amazonian region, an area where Field for more than a century has sent scientists to study human cultures and plants, animals and insects. The Field team also has helped set up 4,000 square miles of biological reserves in China and Cuba.
“I am hoping that, soon enough, a living forest providing watersheds, clean water and clean air will be worth more than a dead forest,” said Moskovits, who as museum vice president heads the conservation division.
“We have to make it obvious to people that, while they can make fast money by cutting down a forest, they won’t make any money from the land once the trees are cut, and they will lose all of the much more valuable long-term benefits the forest provides.”
Many credit Moskovits for adding key features to the original rapid inventory idea that have boosted the Field Museum’s success in getting wilderness areas protected.
“To be effective, it is not good enough just to do an inventory and issue a competent report that is read by other biologists,” Foster said. “There has to be a political and grass-roots human follow-through right away to make something happen. Debby is brilliant at this.”
The Brazilian-born Moskovits did not want the Rapid Biological Inventory efforts to be “gringo-run” operations, so she insists that each initiative enlist national scientists and environmentalists to work side by side with the Field scientists. She also brings in anthropologists to work with indigenous tribes and settlers living inside or alongside the targeted preservation areas, finding ways to integrate them into the plans for protective status for the land.
The team ultimately presents local leaders with a polished final report in attractive book form, with maps and color photos of exotic plants and animals the inventory found.
“You’re talking about areas where you have identified 1,000 or so plant species and hundreds of animal species,” Foster said. “You can give them a lengthy written report, but it really has an impact if you can give them page after page of thumbnail color photos of individual plants and animals. … The photos really explain best the diversity of a place.”
Though the Field Museum Rapid Biological Inventories have helped establish more protected areas than any other similar effort, it isn’t the only institution doing rapid inventory work. Conservation International has resumed the work. The American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution now have inventory programs, as do a few other organizations.
Once an area is under protection, it costs about 40 cents an acre annually to maintain, Moskovits said. That means it would cost more than $10 million a year to care for 40,000 square miles of protected area — an enormous sum for cash-poor nations or non-profit museums, so environmentalists are searching for stable funding sources.
“One hope we have is the creation of the carbon markets that could provide the means to protect these areas,” Moskovits said, citing the ongoing talks about establishing a system in industrialized nations that would encourage industries producing excessive pollution to support environmentally healthy enterprises like rain forest conservation.
The idea of staid and learned natural history museums taking such an active conservation stance might seem odd, but it is a role many museum scientists enthusiastically embrace.
“For a natural history museum to get involved on the ground in the field like this is a very powerful statement of the role of natural history museums in a changing world,” said Sacha Spector, a biologist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
“It really extends the mission of a natural history museum, putting them in the trenches on the front line of conservation. It is work that helps enhance what we already do, study life on Earth, but in this instance we study life on Earth in the service of conservation.”
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wmullen@tribune.com
