Governments around the world often make decisions which concern large areas of wilderness. But in many cases, little is known about the land, and the kinds of plants and animals that live there. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Tom Schulenberg is an ornithologist with The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Working together with Conservation International, he’s also a part of the Rapid Assessment Program, which conducts biodiversity evaluations of wilderness areas and makes land use recommendations to local governments.
“So the Rapid Assessment Program was designed to assemble a team of crack field biologists. Each scientist would be looking at some different kind of organism. We all come back and write reports on each particular kind of plant or animal that we studied and then we pool all the information together and come up with a group recommendation that allows us to have some valid biological underpinning to whatever our recommendations as conservationists would be.”
Since conservation teams rarely have enough time to conduct a complete survey of an area, the challenge for a Rapid Assessment Team is to do the evaluation, you guessed it, rapidly, sometimes in just a few days.
“Now a complete biological inventory might take decades. Well if we were to wait twenty years we would find that there’s very little left to worry about saving because of the rates of habitat loss. So what we want are people who can identify the majority of the species that they study very quickly and also have an understanding, of the role that each species would play in an ecosystem.”
Additional funding for Pulse of the Planet has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.