Earth & Sky

Websites of interest:

AmazonGIS website – Real time images of events and resources shaping the biological heart of the planet

Environmental News Network – Amazon deforestation up 15 percent

The following individual was interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy
President, The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment
Washington, DC

Interview with Dr. Thomas Lovejoy:

ES: Thanks for talking with Earth and Sky tooday. Please tell me a little about the current state of the Amazon.

TL: Well, when you look back, as I can, over 37 years of working in the Amazon, you see two very different and contrasting trends. One is sort of the gloomy one: increased deforestation, increased human population relating to deforestation, and a role of fire in the Amazon on a scale that’s never been seen in history. At the same time, you can see really measurable progress, indeed substantial progress in terms of trying to counter that negative trend. I’m thinking of the creation of national parks and indigenous areas, efforts to fund sustainable development kinds of activities for the local population. So you see both good and you see both bad, and it’s going to be a race to the finish.

ES: What sort of finish do you think that will be?

TL: Well, I believe that there’s growing awareness that you have to protect the amazon or manage the Amazon as an overall system. And the fish biology requires that because some fish essentially span the length of the river system and their annual cycles or lifespans, and the presence of forest is critical in maintaining a hydrological cycle that produces probably more than half the rainfall in the basin. And as that awareness of protecting it as a system comes, then it begins to frame the way people look at individual decisions. So I think what will ultimately happen is that there will actually be active reforestation, slowing of deforestation, and ultimately we should end up with something like 80% of the Amazon still in forest. Some of that will not be primary, but it will be forest.

ES: I understand that you started the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project. Could you tell me about it?

TL: A number of years ago it became apparent that those practicing conservation really didn’t have the scientific information available to properly design a conservation area. They didn’t know how big it had to be. And people were just becoming aware that as forests fragment, the fragments begin to shed species after they become isolated. So they end up becoming impoverished examples of what they had previous been. And all of that is tied to the size of the fragment. And today?some 22 years after I started a major study on Amazon forest fragmentation, which is still going on?there is still a very active, rich subfield of conservation biology that looks at the effects of fragmentation. And I think one of the consequences of all that is there has been a general policy response to try and set up protected areas that are fairly large, something on the order of 1000 square kilometers or bigger. Many of them are bigger, some of them literally get up into something like 2 or 3 million hectares.

ES: Can you talk a little bit more about the process of forest fragmentation?

TL: I think the point here is that as habitat destruction proceeds, it is almost always accompanied by habitat fragmentation. So, instead of 50% of the forest being lost, the remaining 50% being one large block, it tends to be broken up into pieces, which makes the conservation problem even worse than the simple figure of 50% has been lost. In terms of species loss, which is probably the ultimate way that you want to measure all of this, we can’t give you precise numbers about how much more or how many more species are being lost because of these fragmented landscapes. But we’re beginning to get close to the point where we can make that estimation. And so one of the policy responses to that, beyond just trying to create large protected areas, is to try and reconnect the fragments. And one of the really exciting, positive aspects of all of this: because it takes time for fragments to shed species, which ultimately can’t live in the small fragment, there is time to connect fragments before all those species are lost. So you’re going to in fact rescue them from the otherwise inevitable disappearance.

ES: You’ve been active in many projects studying the Amazon region over the years. Can you tell us about that process of understanding the Amazon?

TL: When people first started looking at conservation priorities for the Amazon as a whole, there was not a large amount of information about the geography of the plant and animal species of the Amazon. But one of the first clues we had was an analysis done?I guess it was done about 1969 – looking at bird species and finding that there tended to be clusters, geographic clusters of species, occurring together which occurred nowhere else. And, obviously, whatever the scientific interpretation for how that came to be, those are priority areas for conservation. So, the first time that anybody ever looked basin-wide at priorities, they looked at so-called refugian areas and gave them priority. Subsequently, there was a look based on a bit more knowledge, but mostly still based on the refugian process. Then, in 1990, it became clear that we knew a lot more and it was time to take a new look at the topic, and so with the help of my colleague Ian Prance, then at the New York Botanical Garden, and the support of Conservation International, which did a lot of the leg work, we assembled 100 of the best minds about plant and animal species in the Amazon, and worked out a whole set of biological and conservational priorities, produced a big map, which is called workshop 90 because it occurred in 1990. And of course today we know a lot more. And there’ve been a series of workshops in different parts of the Amazon, establishing different sets of priorities, more complicated priorities, and that’s what we’re trying to incorporate in this new Amazon Geographic Information System project, which can be visited on the Internet at amazongis.org.

ES: What are some of the things that AmazonGIS does?

TL: Well, the advantage of Geograpic Information Systems for this kind of thing is dual, in my view. One is, the picture is changing constantly these days. So, being able to use information technology allows you to sort of continually update it without having to wait five years or whatever before producing an article and hardcopy somewhere. The second advantage is?Today, there’s a lot more information. It’s continually changing. And it really is more suitably dealt with using information technology, and specifically something called Geographical Information Systems, which allow you to accumulate and manipulate huge amounts of information. An so we’ve actually set such a system up which can be visited on the web at amazongis.org. And essentially there are three advantages. One is that you can continually update it, since it’s now a constantly changing picture. Two, you can include large amounts of information, including information about the vectors of development?roads, railroads, pipelines, hydroelectric projects, etc. And third, because it is accessible on the world wide web, it virtually makes this information available to anyone who’s interested, and in my view, really empowers civil society, in this case in the Amazon, to really know the whole picture of what’s going on, and therefore to be much more thoughtful and efficient in deciding what they’re going to do.

ES:

TL: Basically, today the Amazon is inhabited by probably ten times as many non-indigenous people as there was 25 years ago. And roads are being built, pipelines are being built for natural gas and oil, hydroelectric projects are being constructed, transmission lines are being constructed, and lots of roads. And all of those kinds of activities, unless thoughtfully managed and integrated into a larger picture can lead to spontaneous colonization and deforestation. So, most of us who have been working on Amazon conservation all these years are now also thinking about the larger questions: sustainable development, quality of life for the people, quality of life in the urban centers, because if that’s good, than a lot of people will stay in cities and not go back out and end up destroying forests.

ES: During the course of your research in the Amazon, what are some of the things that surprised you?

TL: First of all, biology is continually surprising, because most of the species are still unknown, and there’re just wonderfull things to be discovered all the time. And there are natural phenomenon that clearly must have been occuring before but nobody really perceived. Such as, during El Nino years, it actually gets quite dry in the Amazon. And so nobody picked that connection to general ocean circulation before. So, our understanding of the Amazon is continually being enriched. There’re just wonderfully exciting new insights and discoveries all the time. One of the other surprises that was gradual in coming – it wasn’t an instantaneous surprise – how the whole what’s happening to the rainforest has caught on not only worldwide, but also in the Amazon countries themselves. Because basically, the Amazon was sort of the backyard for all of the Amazon nations. They never paid it a lot of attention. It was even hard to get Brazillian students to go up and work in the Brazillian Amazon 20 years ago. But that’s no longer true. And there is a widespread awareness and there’s widespread concern about doing the right thing, and that’s just wonderful.