Species in Trouble
Stuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the 'Hottest of the
Hot Spots' in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity
p.2
Although tourists may think otherwise, Hawai`i has been so
ecologically manipulated by humans that much of the original
ecology has been extirpated. But, at a crucial moment, he
went there anyway, as an extension of a research project studying
organizational patterns of southwestern U.S. hummingbird communities.
A fellow researcher told him of several species of Hawaiian
honeycreepers that were organized the same way. So Pimm went
to Hawai`i, and it changed his life.
Back in the 1970s, "I don't think we had a word yet
for 'conservation biology,'" he said. "Conservationists
were advocates, something other people did." But in Hawai`i
"I realized that 50 years from now people would not look
back on my papers in Science and Nature.
They would say, 'Pimm you were on duty in Hawai`i when those
species went extinct. You let it happen!' It touched on ethical
and religious concerns, the idea that as a scientist not only
did I have a responsibility, but that there was something
I could do about it." The Society of Conservation
Biology was finally founded in the early 1980s. "From
that meeting on, I knew what I was," he said.
After previous stints on the faculties of Clemson and Texas
Tech universities, Pimm went to the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville in 1982 as an assistant professor in the department
of ecology and evolutionary biology. He would stay in Knoxville
for 17 years, rising to full professor and seeing his department
reorganized as an ecology department in its own right. But
in the end, Pimm was getting restless.
"I really wanted to work in a more explicitly interdisciplinary
group, recognizing that we also had to speak the language
of economics, had to understand social sciences, had to have
remote sensing skills, and had to understand the geological
background of the areas we are working in," he says.
So Pimm relocated to Columbia University in 1999 as a professor
of ecology at the Center for Research and Conservation, taking
some of his graduate students with him. "I expected to
stay at Columbia for a long time," he said. "My
reasons for coming to the Nicholas School have an enormous
amount to do with how attractive the program here is."
Last summer, Pimm's group was formally introduced to the
Nicholas School at an outdoor barbecue, his international
team of graduate students blinking in the bright sunlight.
"It's an incredible mix," he says. "I have
some students from Columbia. I have some who went from Tennessee
to Columbia and are now here. One man and his family moved
three times in three years."
Mariana Vale has been working with Pimm for two years and
is now beginning a doctoral research project in the Brazilian
Amazon. "I love working with Stuart," she said.
"He's always been very supportive of me, and he's an
amazing scientist. He's my endless resource for everything."
A native of Rio de Janeiro who finished her master's degree
when Pimm was at Columbia, Vale is starting to study how human
alterations to the Amazon's delicate environment are affecting
the distribution and conservation of perching birds.
"He has one of the most incredible minds that I've ever
encountered," said Luke Dollar, who studies the fearsome
fossa, Madagascar's major predator (see Action
| Student News), as well as uses remote sensing
to document changes in that environmentally beleaguered nation.
"He does so many different things, and he does them
all much better than the next guy. He's never had a graduate
student he's not been in the field with. He's not so much
a boss or a teacher as he is an academic father figure."
Dalia Conde, another doctoral student who followed Pimm to
Duke from Columbia, said "I'm really happy to work with
him because I think he is open about working with international
students and understanding different cultures." A native
of Mexico City, Conde spent previous years doing conservation
projects for a non-government organization (NGO) in Mexico.
page 1 | 2
| 3 | 4 |
