The Faces of TEAM

Posted 10 November 2011 by Benj in Multimedia, Photography

In April, we traveled to Tanzania to document a workshop and training for tropical ecologists. TEAM (Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring) is a Conservation International project designed to provide an early warning system on the status of biodiversity and climate change in the tropics. The network generates real time, publicly available data through a rapidly growing global network of field stations. We wrote about one component of our work upon our return last May. Today, we can share the magazine we produced during our week in Dar es Salaam.

TEAM currently has 18 site managers from tropical forests in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This diverse group of scientists gathered in Dar to network, train and solve shared challenges from their home sites. Similar to the Natural Histories Project, our job was to find a way to bring this group of voices to a wider audience.

Over a few days, we completed short interviews with each site manager along with a high-key portrait. We pulled quotes from each that, when read together, help explain the researchers’ work and why it’s important. The issues TEAM is tackling are serious and the data significant, but it’s the dedication and passion of the people in the network that makes the project compelling.

The resulting piece, The Faces of TEAM, is distributed as a printed-on-demand magazine (order here) and an iPad-optimized PDF.

Excerpts below:

PATRICIA ALVAREZ
“Your days can go really crappy. Trust me. I got this scar here. I’ve been stung by a sting ray, a scorpion… You can have a really, really crappy day. You lost a boat. Your gasoline was taken by the river. It’s raining. Your tent is invaded by ants. You have the worst day of your life and you’re ready to cry and say I hate this place. I hate the jungle. They should burn the jungle and put cement on it. I’ve said it. And then you see this little monkey looking at you. It can be a little frog, it can be a fungi that I’ve never seen in my life. And that’s it. That’s the magic of Cashu.”

DAVID KENFACK
“The most exciting for me is the camera traps. The camera trap data is going to be very important for the management plan of the park because so far there is no clear picture of what is in the park as far as animals. Sometimes when we go to town we have encounters with elephants, but we don’t know how many elephants are there. We don’t know where they are. So with the camera trap studies we are going to have a better understanding of what is in the park, where it is, how dynamic the population is and so on. It’s also important for the entire country because it’s going to set an example for how to monitor wildlife. I think it’s the first time that this type of equipment has been used in Cameroon.”

BADRU MUGERWA
“I find it amazing that a small group of people came up with this idea. Now it has grown to a global scale and it’s an honor to be part of this network. It’s already part of the team vision, expanding more, having 40 sites. So I think my work is to keep it going. It’s not all about collecting data for a PhD study over three years and then keeping your data on a shelf. We need something long-term going on, and data shared on a global scale, just the way TEAM does it.
I think if we’re going to help other life survive, regardless of all the threats we are facing, it has to be a joint collaboration. We have to join hands to help other species to live, to continue existing.”