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The Faces of TEAM
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.”
On the outside
A short, uplifting postscript on our Connecting Prisons with Nature video we produced two years ago for the Sustainable Prisons Project:
Daniel Travatte, the bee-keeping inmate, was recently profiled in the Kitsap Sun. He was released from prison last June and is now raising 70,000 bees professionally. Read the full story at the Kitsap Sun.
The captive-rearing program for the Oregon-spotted frog continues to exceed expectations. Earlier this year, egg nests were found at the release site, indicating that the frogs had survived and were beginning to reproduce in the wild. Last week, 163 new frogs were taken to Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Harry Greer was able release the frogs himself. Harry, an inmate who has worked on the project since its inception, is now on work release. Read more on the SPP Blog.
The Natural Histories Project
In June the Natural History Initiative held a fourth and final synthesis workshop at North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Throughout this year we documented the first three of these workshops (focused on natural history and society, education and research), recording conversations between pairs of participants and combining them with intimate portraits. The results are featured as a series of broadsides and an interactive website.
After the last workshop we added more than 30 new conversations to the website, bringing the grand total up to 99. But that’s not all that’s new. Originally called From Decline to Rebirth, the project has a brand-new name: The Natural Histories Project. And there is now a short video to introduce it.
With all of this new stuff, the Natural History Network decided it was time for a website that would help the organization to maximize the impact of the workshops and this project. So we worked with our good friend and frequent collaborator Darin Reid to build them one.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a naturalist,” says the Network’s vice-president Josh Tewksbury, “perhaps the most exciting time to be a naturalist that has ever existed on this planet.” We hope you will watch our new video to find out why, join the Network and (most importantly) get out to practice your own natural histories!
Tanzania x 2: Coming soon!
We recently got back from our second trip to Tanzania with Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM). The goal of this trip was to create a portfolio of images that illustrate ecosystem services and the Network’s biodiversity monitoring initiatives. We’ll share these images, along with a brand-new magazine that we produced from our first trip in the coming weeks.
LightHawk Annual Report
LightHawk’s View From Above annual report just came out and I was honored that a photo from my Skagit series was featured. The organization provides donated flights to conservation organizations and has been a huge help with our work. A big thanks to LightHawk and pilot Linda Chism for their continued support.
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