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Ecosystem Services in Tanzania

"Most conservation science today isn't ambitious enough," says Conservation International's Sandy Andelman. "We are informing battles, but we are not providing the knowledge needed, at the scale needed, to win the war." To meet this challenge, Conservation International, the Earth Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation envision a monitoring network that combines ecological, agricultural and socioeconomic data from around the world. The approach is similar to TEAM's biodiversity monitoring, but the focus is ecosystem services and the scale is huge: 400 sites within two or three years.

To help bring this vision to life, we visited southern Tanzania to produce an image library and exhibit. We accompanied researchers collecting micro-climate data from farmers' fields, installed camera traps on the steep slopes of Udzungwa National Park, and tried to show the link between intact ecosystems and the foods, fuelwood and clean water that communities depend on. The images above are selections from this series.