NEB Podcast #75 -
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Manager & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewee: Andrew Whitworth, Ph.D., Executive Director, Osa Conservation; Eleanor Flatt, Director of Conservation Campus, Osa Conservation
Lydia Morrison:
Welcome to the Lessons From Lab and Life podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I'm your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Andrew Whitworth, who's the executive director of the Osa Conservation, and Eleanor Flatt, who's the director of the Osa Conservation Campus. The Osa Conservation is a nonprofit, working to protect Southern Costa Rica's invaluable biodiversity through ecosystem stewardship, scientific research and education, and sustainable economic development. Andy and Eleanor, thank you so much for being here at NEB and joining us for the podcast today.
Eleanor Flatt:
It's great to be here.
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. Andy, let's start with you. You're the executive director of Osa Conservation. How did you become involved with the program?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
Well, that was around nine years ago now, and I was working down in the Peruvian Amazon. Most of my previous research experience had been Western Amazon, Peru and Ecuador. And I was aware of a guy called Adrian Forsyth, who has been pretty fundamental in terms of helping to raise funds and develop a protected area network throughout the Western Amazon. And he was quite an inspirational character to me. I think I fired him a message on Facebook at the time begging him for a job.
But I had leishmaniasis three times then, which is a tropical disease that you pick up in the Amazon and he convinced me to take a break from the Amazon and come out to Costa Rica. And he was actually a co-founder in Osa Conservation. That was nine years ago. I flew out there, stood on the beach down near Corcovado National Park and just looked out on this completely undeveloped coastline of raw Pacific Ocean against this mini Amazon rainforest-style system on the Osa Peninsula, and I was just hooked.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. Wow. It sounds like a pretty epic and amazing opportunity that you had. And what about you, Eleanor?
Eleanor Flatt:
Yeah, I finished my undergrad and was like, "I need to get out and get some field experience." So I took a two-month internship in the Osa Peninsula looking at sea turtles. And I've now been living and working in the Osa Peninsula for 10 years and two months. So I definitely found an incredible place and it's really nice to have some conservation hope and to keep working there. And I've been looking at wildlife and movement ecology and now I'm overseeing our conservation facilities, so very excited.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, that sounds like an amazing position and I can absolutely understand how sea turtles could steal your heart.
Eleanor Flatt:
Definitely.
Lydia Morrison:
I think a lot of people can relate to that. Could you explain to our listeners why biodiversity is so important and why it needs protecting?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
That's a great question and I'd love to answer it, but essentially biodiversity are the building blocks of life on earth. That's the most fundamental way of thinking about it, but also the most important. Everything that we think about in terms of ecological processes is really shaped around those fundamentals. Biodiversity shapes the way that our ecosystems function, the processes of life on earth, and essentially it's tied to the health of the planet.
And just a couple of examples are, we do a lot of work studying vultures and vultures clean up dead things in an ecosystem and they help to prevent the spread of disease, which is important to humans. So there are these real tangible links between biodiversity and life on earth and the health of the planet. And even when we think about things like carbon schemes and carbon credits, they're intrinsically linked to biodiversity.
And there's some research that was done by a guy called Carlos Peres, who was one of the co-authors in the Brazilian Amazon. And they actually found that if you lost spider monkeys and tapirs from the Amazon rainforest, you could lose well over 20% of carbon stocks in the future in some areas. So biodiversity is really key to our survival on earth.
Lydia Morrison:
And what are some of the things that threaten biodiversity?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
There's a whole plethora of real attacks on biodiversity right now. And I would say a couple of the largest ones are certainly in the tropics where most of biodiversity is situated is really habitat loss and a conversion for agriculture. So things like area to have cattle so that we can have beef and essentially soy to provide food crops for that beef. And those are some of the biggest destroyers of habitat. There are some specific emerging threats like gold mining, which is huge with the expansion of the demand for gold, really threatens rainforest systems. It's taken down to extract gold.
And there are all kinds of other threats about like emerging diseases like the chytrid fungus with amphibians or you might have heard of the white-nose syndrome that's affecting bats, these fungal pathogens. And then obviously climate change is the big thing now that's almost putting an added pressure on all those other threats where biodiversity is now having to adapt and move. And that's where a lot of our work is really focused, is about how do we build climate resilience for biodiversity when species aren't just going to stay in these protected areas that we've established, but a lot of species are going to need to move to find suitable temperatures and physical conditions that they can adapt to.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. The problem sounds really complex, so how do you go about protecting biodiversity and helping to build those habitats where creatures can sustain climate change or the change in different weather patterns and can adapt to that?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
That, again, is kind of like new thinking for us. And I would say to some extent we're on the back foot because conservation has been working really hard with two main strategies over the last century. And the first of those is to establish protected areas, whether it's a national park or an indigenous reserve and put a safe space around an important piece of landscape. The other approach has been to look at endemic species or something that's really endangered and rare and then create a reserve and shape it around that rare species. But this is where the challenge comes in.
If you think about how conditions are going to change under climate change, and they are doing very quickly, species are already on the move, the reality is we do understand how that's going to play out because of past climate change events, but also under what's happening. So in the temperate areas, species tend to move towards the poles. So they either go north or they'll go south. So if you think about grizzly bears expanding northward into the range of polar bears, then the temperate species are moving towards the poles. In the tropics, species are already really close to their thermal maximum and what they have to do to respond very quickly is move towards mountains and rugged topography.
So if you think where you've got big rivers crashing down through valleys, it creates cooling conditions and these refugio (shelters) here where species can survive. And it's inevitable that we will lose a lot of species in climate change. If you think about the species on the top of the mountains, they don't have anywhere to go. And then some species that might live in the lowlands might be tied to a specific feature like a lake or something that they're not going to find at higher elevations. But our best bet in the tropics is to preserve these mountainous gradients and corridors of lowlands to mountain tops. And if we can serve those gradients, we can save as many species in the biodiverse tropics as possible.
Lydia Morrison:
I think that this is what you're describing, but could you explain the Ridge to Reef initiative? Based on the description that you just gave, I can imagine that the mountains are the ridges and you want to protect the land all the way down to the ocean. Could you tell us about the efforts you currently have focused on the Ridge to Reef initiative?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
Yeah, it's a perfect segue. And what I would say is, I was talking about a pantropical approach, but what Osa Conservation is doing is putting that to work and trying to build that as a real working model in the Ridge to Reef program. So we're thinking about how we can protect not just Corcorvado National Park and the Lowlands, but create a habitat corridor all the way up to the top of the Talamanca mountains. But in Osa's context, it also expands to the marine environment and those sea turtle populations that Eleanor came to Costa Rica to work on and thinking about protecting these critical marine habitats. And that's obviously going to be really key to almost have a green-blue conservation strategy.
Lydia Morrison:
That sounds like a really sound plan for dealing with climate change. How do you win back some of those areas that have been converted into cattle pasture or agricultural fields? How do you rebuild that corridor?
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
Well, I think that's going to be maybe an approach in different parts of the world where there might be different strategies needed and approaches to do that. But if we were speaking about our landscape in particular, which has been degraded, the zone in between the Lowlands and the mountains has been cleared mostly for cattle agriculture. But what we found is that if we talk to farmers about the big vision and we talk to them about basic principles about how we can improve things in terms of habitat connectivity, such as replacing, say, barbed wire fences with live fences, with trees, how we can restore the degraded habitat around the streams and the rivers of the system and just connect some of the forest patches with narrow passageways of trees, the farmers in our landscape are really engaged to make those changes.
We're not asking them to offset huge chunks of land, it's just small changes to practices. And then our team of restoration workers who collect seeds and produce trees in bags go in and do the work and help the farmers to transform those landscapes. The uptake's been incredible. And we started this maybe five or six years ago, and we now have over 300 farms. And we're almost inundated with farmers coming to us, asking us to work with them. Obviously, we're not experts necessarily in agriculture, so we work with partners about how we can bring techniques to farmers to help them with best practices like rotational grazing or diversified revenue streams with different crops. So it's a real partnership approach to really tap into the existing social fabric of the landscape.
Lydia Morrison:
That's wonderful. And it's so nice to hear that the farmers are really engaged and really want to be a part of living harmoniously with the other animals and flora and fauna that are in the area as well.
Eleanor, I know that you are the director of the Conservation Campus, which is your base there in Costa Rica. Could you explain what the campus is all about and who comes to do work there or volunteer there?
Eleanor Flatt:
Yes, definitely. I often get asked, "What is a conservation campus?" because typically, we have field stations where researchers will come for two weeks, collect data, and then they leave. But the idea of a conservation campus is that it's for such a wide group of people.
We have researchers, we have university groups coming through our youth club. It's also a base for our science and conservation team that are doing the work that Andy's just described. So it's their base as well. And it's this inclusive hub for research and conservation in the middle of the rainforest. So it's a very cool place to come and visit.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. I saw some pictures on your website earlier. It looks really amazing. How long do people visit for?
Eleanor Flatt:
It varies a lot depending on what you're coming to do. Maybe if you come to volunteer, you'll come for one to two months. If you're part of a research fellowship, you'll come for six to nine months. And then we have visitors that are just coming to get a hands-on conservation experience and just have a slightly different vacation and they might come for a few days.
Lydia Morrison:
That's a really cool vacation option. I could see that being really interesting for people in the science field or in entomology or something like that. That sounds like a really unique opportunity. If someone wanted to support Osa or volunteer or come visit you, where can they find more information on where to do that?
Eleanor Flatt:
On our website, it has our contact details and all of the information about the different experiences and opportunities at the campus. And whether you're coming to volunteer or just visit, that visit helps support and fund our conservation work. So it's a big help to us to have people to come to the campus.
Lydia Morrison:
Wow, that sounds like a really amazing and different vacation opportunity. And I actually have to admit to our listeners that I recently had the opportunity to take that educational vacation with some of my colleagues from New England Biolabs, and we all went down to the Osa Peninsula to visit the Osa Conservation Campus there and spend some time with Eleanor and the other scientists who live and work there. So I'm excited to share some of the audio for my trip there.
Eleanor Flatt:
... like where they're missing flippers because they've been hit by boats, but they're very resilient.
Lydia Morrison:
and there are predators?
Eleanor Flatt:
Yeah. In some parts of Costa Rica, jaguars will eat sea turtles.
Lydia Morrison:
Okay.
Eleanor Flatt:
So they face a lot of threats, but they are a very resilient animal. We've seen individuals with their flippers almost hanging off, and then when we see her two weeks later, she's recovered.
Lydia Morrison:
As always, we'll have links to lots of the things we discussed here in our transcript. And I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you both so much for joining us for a podcast today. I know this was a little last-minute sprung on you, and I really appreciate your flexibility.
Eleanor Flatt:
Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Whitworth:
Thank you very much. We're always happy to share anything about the work we're doing, so thanks for having us.
Eleanor Flatt:
Yeah, it's been great. Thank you for having us.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, we're excited to spread the word. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons From Lab and Life podcast. We invite you to check out this episode's transcript on neb.com for helpful links from today's discussion. And we hope you'll join us for the next episode when I'm joined by Dr. Eric Dinerstein, a field biologist who has dedicated his career to wildlife conservation efforts. Eric is the Chief Scientist and Senior Conservation Counsel at Conservation X Labs, an organization focused on preventing another mass extinction event on our planet.
