Profiling Pimm's team: Videographer Peter Jordan '01 films graduate student Mariana Vale on flooded road in Brazil

For Stuart Pimm and his group of graduate students, the trip always begins the same way--with furious last-minute packing, a visit to CVS for anti-malarials, and a final powwow in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

Eye in the Sky

Where it takes them, though, may be to a Madagascan jungle or an Everglades prairie or the savannahs of southern Africa. Such are the far-flung field sites that Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, visits regularly to oversee his team's work. A mix of doctoral and professional students--Pimm calls them his "family"--they study the various threats (all human) to the planet's variety of life and what, if anything, can be done to curb current trends.

Disappearing World: A Scientific Adventure Story Video by Peter Jordan '01 view now Quicktime required, Broadband connection recommended.

Compassionate Conservation Photos by Alex Fattal view now

"We are killing off species at between 100 and 1,000 times the natural rate," says Pimm. "I think we're likely to lose 25 to 50 percent of them over the next century." He says that prompts the question, "What is our moral responsibility?"

In Pimm's view, the crisis is both an ethical and an ecological one, and only by immediately protecting what he calls the "special places"--the areas richest in biodiversity and most directly in the path of human advance--can we hope to avert it. That's a message he's sought to spread to his scientific peers, policy-makers, and the public alike. Pimm is an academic scientist, indeed one of the world's foremost experts on theoretical ecology. But he is a problem-solver in practice, a prime example of what, last Founders' Day, President Richard H. Brodhead described as Duke's "real-world orientation."

Last July, Pimm was in the real world's biggest rain forest, the Brazilian Amazon, where he and his team began a two-week journey to the frontline of conservation and the frontiers of the natural world. Along the way, they would make a stop in Brasilia, the nation's capital, for the nineteenth annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), where Pimm would confer with colleagues, and his students would present their work. That organization has special significance for him. "Back in the Seventies, there was no such thing as 'conservation biology,' " he says. "Conservationists were advocates, not scientists." It was after the SCB's inaugural meeting in the mid-Eighties that, as he puts it, "I knew what I was."

Over breakfast at his hotel in Manaus, the chief commercial hub of the upper Amazon basin, Pimm appeared exhausted. He had flown in that morning from the Roraima region to the north, where he'd accompanied one of his students, a Brazilian named Mariana Vale (pronounced VAH-lee), into the field. For months, Vale had been tracking the Rio Branco Antbird, one of the world's rarest and most threatened species of birds, on her computer at Duke. Using satellite images, she had mapped its habitat--vegetation and elevation--in a patch of forest just south of the Venezuelan border. She'd searched museum records for information on previous sightings--the few that there were--and plotted what she believed to be the bird's geographical distribution.

But Vale could only make guesses from her desk in Durham. To confirm anything, she'd have to see it with her own eyes, to "ground-truth" it, as Pimm put it. "At some point," he said, "you have to make sure that what you're seeing on the image is really what is there. You have to go."

So they went--first to Caracas, Venezuela, and then by taxi across the country--down through the Orinoco basin, up the highlands of the Guyana Shield, past the giant sheer-faced tepuis that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, and, finally, over the border into Brazil, to a town called Boa Vista. From there, they traveled ten hours up the Uracoeira River, a tributary of the Amazon, in an open boat under the blazing equatorial sun. They slept in hammocks draped with mosquito netting to ward off malaria and caught catfish for dinner.

For Pimm, the conditions were nothing new; he has been to the field with each of his students on at least one occasion. Usually the goal is the same: to find a bird. If that seems like a small reward for the investment made and the risks assumed--death by snakebite and lethal infection being among the more likely life-ending scenarios--consider the bird's scientific significance. "They're our window into what is happening to the rest of the environment," Pimm explained. "Few groups of plants and animals have catalogues as complete. We know them--how many there [are] and where they are--very well." That's a product of the public's passion, he said--birdwatchers the world over have given science a useful tool.

Still, he added, tools and know-how alone won't prevent extinctions. "We need to train more conservation professionals," he said. "You can't set up a protected area without people to look after it. Just like politics is local, conservation is local. So wherever my group goes, we're working with the community. We don't go as uninvited gringos. We go to provide expertise to the people who will ultimately be making the big decisions, who will shape policy."

For the past decade, Pimm's team has collaborated with the Brazilian government's National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus. Paired with INPA scientists, they've contributed findings to one of the institute's core programs, a joint research venture with the Smithsonian Institution called the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP). The BDFFP is the brainchild of a scientist named Thomas Lovejoy, formerly the senior biodiversity adviser to the president of the United Nations Foundation and the man generally credited with bringing deforestation of the tropics to the public's attention.

Almost thirty years ago, Lovejoy embarked on an ambitious ecological experiment in the rain forest north of Manaus. He wanted to find out what happened to a rain forest when it was broken up into fragments--the leftovers of clearing--and how small a fragment could be and still function. He speculated that a key theory of island bio-geography--namely, that a small oceanic island can support fewer species than a larger one--might apply to these "islands" of forest, surrounded as they were by farms and cattle pastures.

After two decades of monitoring a sample of fragments ranging in size from 2.5 to 250 acres, a group of ecologists assessed the results. Lovejoy was right: In every one, the diversity of palm trees, euglossine bees, butterflies, dung beetles, termites, birds, and primates had declined. Pimm chaired that assessment and, afterwards, wrote the report. By the time the results came out, it was no longer controversial, he wrote, to say that small, isolated fragments lose species. "Deforestation has provided many examples worldwide." But what was new, and what would give added urgency to future conservation efforts, was how quickly the losses were happening.

Following that assessment, Lovejoy asked Pimm to help him with the project. He needed people who could analyze the loads of data, publish papers, and generate more science. And Pimm, he knew, had the students for the job: smart, tough, young researchers with experience in the field.

Kyle Van Houtan, a current member of Pimm's "family" of graduate students, already had his field scars when he came to pursue his Ph.D. under Pimm in 2002. As a master's candidate at Stanford University, he'd studied parrots and macaws--curious for their clay-eating habits--on a river in southeastern Peru. After three months in a place locals called El Infierno (Hell), he noticed a sore on his leg that wouldn't go away. A trip to the doctor revealed Leishmaniasis, a potentially fatal disease spread by the bite of the sand fly. The treatment was a month of chemotherapy.