Tropical Conservation. Perspectives on Local and Global Priorities. Aguirre, A.A., and R. Sukumar, editors. 2017. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. 520 pp. £64.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-976698-7. Coexistence. The Ecology and Evolution of Tropical Biodiversity. Sapp, J. 2016. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. 275 pp. US$49.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-063244-1. Perspectives on functioning and importance of tropical regions, home of 75% of the world's human population and 90% of its biodiversity, have been evolving over time. Coexistence of species was soon established as a key problem of tropical ecology, whereas coexistence of humans and wildlife was identified as a key problem of tropical conservation. After decades of development, the time is ripe for a historical summary, overview of successes, failures, and struggles of both. Aguirre and Sukumar's Tropical Conservation is a vivid collection of perspectives on current tropical conservation that react to pressing conservation needs in the last three decades in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The book is mostly a collection of contributions from members of the Wildlife Trust Alliance (WTA), established in 2000 in Bangalore, India, which was created on a simple concept: build an egalitarian network among leading local scientists committed to sustaining the ecosystems they study. In concordance with the WTA's original mission, the book represents a practical collection of case studies and real-world scenarios reported by scientists based in the tropics. The book is the swan song of the original WTA and was conceived at its last meeting in Costa Rica in 2009, shortly before the organization became the EcoHealth Alliance in 2011 and its focus changed to wildlife health and pandemic prevention. The collection of case studies introduces important conservation concepts and illustrates their applications. Although it points out some failures and shortfalls, the book actually reflects the insufficient progress most of the tropical nations have made in establishing protected areas and training ecologists and conservation scientists. Most of the topics discussed by the authors relate to the actual biological systems and functions that need to be conserved, but all the authors, as conservation practitioners, know that in the end only a little progress can be made without understanding the human social dynamics and economics that both cause the pressures and offer conservation solutions. The book is organized into 5 major themes that are nicely connected to each other. The first theme, “Conserving Biodiversity and Ecological Functionality in Human Dominated Landscapes” reviews what can be accomplished in heavily populated underdeveloped countries. It deals with habitat loss and fragmentation, integration of ecological corridors into multiuse landscapes, community-based conservation, and policy interventions. Case studies include corridors for elephants in India, biodiversity conservation in megacities, and links between land-use and infectious disease emergence. The second theme, “Resolving Conflicts between Wildlife and Humans” develops and reviews the strategies needed to balance human and wildlife needs. A broad spectrum of species is covered including gorillas, bats, dolphins, manatees, and sea turtles. There is a very interesting chapter on invasive plants that have a lesser known potential to indirectly contribute to wildlife-human conflicts. A case study on Lantana camara reports on its negative impact on forest species composition which in turn has directly affected herbivore populations and indirectly affected carnivore populations and networks of dispersers. The third theme, “Approaches to Conserving Species: Emerging Lessons and New Science” comprises especially valuable contributions on umbrella species. Although the prominence of this approach (i.e., diversity being conserved under the umbrella of a single, often charismatic species) has declined somewhat, it remains one of the most useful conservation tools in the tropics and subtropics. The contributions to this theme discuss innovative approaches, new insights into population dynamics, metapopulation analyses, and conservation genetics. The case studies focus on wildlife in Ethiopia (Neotropical deer, peccaries, and tapirs), Mexican jaguars, and insects of tropical archipelago in Indonesia. The fourth topic, “Integrating Conservation and Sustainable Use” deals in wonderful way with the never-ending fight between hunters, poachers, and wildlife. Some of the chapters describe difficulties that need to be addressed to reconcile human use and conservation of species. For example, the excellent paper about crocodile harvesting provides very useful and detailed strategies that worked or failed in different countries and compares the best and worst examples of how crocodile hunting might be managed. Other contributions provide an overview of illegal trade and genetic techniques used to address poaching and bushmeat consumption. Examples are linked to crocodile farming, consumption of the nests of the swiftlet Aerodramus fuciphagus, and trade in Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus). The final chapters, under the theme “Building Capacity to Sustain Conservation: People, Institutions and Networks” nicely wraps up all previous cases and studies. Several contributions report, quite surprisingly, a lack of meaningful practical knowledge and state that lack of factual knowledge of biological details about conservation is not a problem in the studied countries. These contributions also argue for educating mainly the residents of urban areas and promote an education system that adheres to the basic human virtue of environmental stewardship. This seems to be the main direction several contributors believe current tropical conservation should be heading. They ultimately agree that conservation hinges on well-trained and motivated people and adequate institutional infrastructures. Tropical conservation has been driven for many decades mostly by scientists from temperate latitudes, rather than its being a cause in local social settings. In the final part of the book, the reader is provided a genuine overview of such shortfalls, the challenges to some major institutions involved in conservation, and background on what has and has not worked. The book provides a unique and readable exposure to conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Asia and has the potential to become a key resource on the biodiversity conservation crisis in the tropics for university professors, students, researchers, and practitioners in conservation. Although the majority of the contributions deals with fauna, several chapters on flora and biodiversity are also included and provide interesting perspectives. Sapp's Coexistence is a hybrid. It combines a century-long history of field research centered on the Barro Colorado Island (BCI) with an overview of ideas in tropical ecology as they evolved over time. Coexistence of species is a key problem of tropical ecology, but the author also addresses the coexistence of researchers in small communities at tropical field stations and the coexistence of these stations with an often uncomprehending society around them. The approach works well because the author alternates drier chapters on science with livelier descriptions of often colorful characters and their doings in Panama. The BCI station, gradually morphing into the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), is an appropriate subject for a historical perspective on tropical ecology - no other biological discipline is dominated by a particular study site to the same degree as tropical ecology has been dominated by the BCI. Bizarrely, the most studied tropical rainforest in the world is on a small, artificially created island in the middle of a busy shipping lane that for most of its existence was also in a military zone. The guardianship of BCI by the U.S. Army ensured its longevity, but also embroiled it in the political complexities of the United States—Panama relationship. Skillful negotiations ensured the transformation of STRI from an arm of a colonial-era power to an international organization with a mission that entailed a genuine partnership with the Panamanian government, a rare success story in the postcolonial tropics. The STRI has inspired students of ecology worldwide, but its impact is surprisingly small in its immediate neighborhood. According to our quick search in Web of Science, scientists at the University of Panama coauthored only 2% of ecological papers published from Panama during the last decade, compared with STRI's 89%. Overseas-driven research establishments operating in the tropics generally have a hard time networking with their local research counterparts, but it appears that Panama, STRI, or both are doing particularly poorly in this regard. Although the BCI station was secure in the Canal Zone, STRI lost the use of its San Blas marine station in 1997. The tribal Kuna landowners voted against the renewal of their license, after 20 years of operation on their lands, amid rumors that the STRI was stealing corals, gold, and lobsters. Tribal politics is exceptionally difficult and researchers do not tend to excel at it. No matter what legal documents say, each tribal deal has to be renegotiated every generation, and each generation should be persuaded anew about the station's merits. The STRI kept Kuna people informed about its activities at the San Blas by “presenting them with published research papers…” No wonder the station was lost. Ecologists’ struggle to explain why a tropical rainforest looks like an intelligently designed arboretum, nicely mixing trees from many different species, represents a recurrent theme of tropical ecology as well as of this book. To solve the mystery, S. Hubbell and R. Foster proposed to monitor >250,000 individual plants with stem diameter ≥1 cm within a 50-ha plot on BCI. This was a significant departure from the customary ∼1,000 plants ≥5 cm in diameter in 1-ha plots. Predictably, such an audacious proposition faced resistance from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Any suggestion to increase the standard sample size by two orders of magnitude implies that everybody else had done a really poor job. In the end, the proposal was saved by an ornithologist, F. James, precisely because ornithologists are not personally committed to plant plots. The BCI plot laid the foundation for a global network, the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS). The network spread rapidly, particularly in Asia, where it was spearheaded by P. Ashton from the Arnold Arboretum. After his retirement, Harvard University left CTFS in 2012 because, as put by a staff botanist, “the new director of the Arnold Arboretum was more interested in gymnosperm ovules than global research networks.” The Smithsonian Institution had no problem recognizing the golden-egg-laying goose and promptly expanded its role to replace the funds and services previously provided by Harvard. At present, CTFS (rebranded as ForestGEO to reflect its broadened research scope) is probably the most successful ecological research collaboration in the world. It monitors 6 million trees from 10,000 species and is expanding to temperate forests and in new research directions, such as monitoring insect communities on trees. In a rare case of having an inspirational idea at an airport, A. P. Smith realized that a standard construction tower crane erected in a rainforest could bring researchers to the forest canopy, “the last biological frontier.” The world's first canopy crane was erected by STRI in the Panama City's Metropolitan Park in 1990 as another pioneering act that started a global ecological network. In 1997 another crane was installed, also in Panama, in the San Lorenzo rainforest on the Caribbean coast. However, it took years for even basic accommodation to be built next to the crane, and to this day the crane operators drive daily back and forth between the crane and Panama City, limiting the time available to scientists for work on the crane. Employees’ comfort, regrettably, wins over research efficiency, in sharp contrast to the 1920s, when the crucial decision was made to build a basic field station on BCI, where the biological action was, rather than a much more comfortable facility in Panama City. The fate of the International Canopy Crane Network was unfortunately very different from that of CTFS. There has never been any significant collaboration among the crane projects in different countries. The dynamics of the crane network expansion slowed down after the first enthusiastic decade, and no cranes were built from 2002 to 2013. The recent revival of crane construction, particularly in China, may offer the global crane network a second chance (Nakamura et al. 2017). Although the forest plots, cranes, and other field methods continued to generate large data sets on rainforest vegetation and its consumers, the debate on the determinants of tropical biodiversity has been progressing slowly. The Janzen-Connell hypothesis, which contends that high plant diversity in rainforests is due to the effects of specialized natural enemies on plant population dynamics, has been examined since its inception in 1970. Interestingly, there were initially no attempts to test the hypothesis experimentally, in contrast to testing of the theory of island biogeography (Wilson & Simberloff 1969). We had to wait 40 years and to the penultimate chapter of Coexistence to learn the results of such experiments. They will probably feature much more prominently in the next volume, hopefully describing the travails of tropical ecology and the BCI research station in the 21st century. Tropical ecology has been driven mostly by scientists from temperate latitudes, which made their field research stations often socially and intellectually awkward foreign elements in tropical locations. The life span of such stations tends to be rather short, but there is little doubt that STRI will live to see its 100th birthday. Its history illustrates the crucial role of longevity, made possible by reliable and predictable financial support of field research stations in the tropics.
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Mar 1, 2024
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