Eleanor Sterling Blogs for The New York Times from Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge

Thursday, July 29 3:28 pm

Eleanor Sterling, director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, began blogging this week for The New York Times from the pristine Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific, where she and six Museum colleagues are studying the green and hawksbill sea turtles. This is the conservation biologist’s second stint with the new feature“Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field,” which was inaugurated in April by Christopher Raxworthy, curator in the Museum’s Department of Herpetology, with vivid accounts of his search for chameleons, frogs, and lizards in Madagascar. Sterling previously reported from the rainforests of Vietnam where she was part of a team surveying one of the last remaining populations of the gray-shanked douc langurs in the wild.

The Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is a unique environment relatively free from human influence. “We are smack in the middle of nowhere, just above the equator in the Pacific — about a thousand miles south of Hawaii,” Sterling wrote in her post to set the scene. “The total human population on the atoll varies month to month because it consists entirely of refuge managers, researchers and the research station crew. This two-week period we have 17 on the atoll.”

Sterling and her team are trying to understand the importance of the remote, uninhabited atoll as a foraging, as opposed to a nesting, site for turtles migrating across the Pacific Ocean. Now readers can peek over the scientists’ shoulders for the next few weeks.

Credit: F. Arengo

Eleanor Sterling Blogs from Vietnam for The New York Times

Thursday, June 10 8:44 am

Grey-shanked douc (WWF Vietnam) Eleanor Sterling ((c) AMNH/D. Finnin)

Over the next few weeks, Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Natural History, will blog from a remote mountain in Vietnam as she and colleagues look for a highly endangered primate, the grey-shanked douc (Pygathrix cinerea). Sterling will take readers along on the expedition by posting stories about her field adventures, conservation work, and discoveries to The New York Times’s “Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field” blog.

“I still remember the first time I saw a douc langur, an elegant leaf-eating monkey, in the wild. It was in the 1990s in a rainforest in central Vietnam and I had heard an ever-so-slight rustling overhead,” writes Sterling in her post on June 8. “I waited quietly beneath the tree until I saw a beautiful porcelain-faced animal peer down at me through the mist and leaves.”

Sterling, a conservation biologist with over 25 years of field research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has conducted surveys, behavioral research, and ecological studies of primates, whales, sea turtles, and other animals. With her staff at the CBC, she has translated the information gleaned from research into recommendations for conservation managers, decision-makers, and educators. Sterling has also studied biodiversity and the history of land use in Vietnam, leading to the publication of the award-winning Vietnam: A Natural History, co-authored with two CBC colleagues and published by Yale University press in 2006.

Sterling is conducting her current field research in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund in Vietnam. A team will be traveling to Hon Mo Mountain to count the number of individuals and map the population boundaries of the grey-shanked doucs; this information will be used to formulate a conservation plan for this rare primate. Grey-shanked doucs are of the world’s most recently described primates and are found only in Vietnam. The species is considered one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates. Threats to this species come from both habitat loss (doucs live in trees) and hunting (for use in traditional medicine as well as for the trade in wild meat and pets).

Sterling also is director of graduate studies in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University.

Watch a video below of Sterling discussing the importance of biodiversity.

Podcast: Children’s Health and Healthy Ecosystems

Thursday, May 13 1:48 pm

The American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Children’s Development Programme, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine on April 30, 2010 to discuss the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in relation to children’s health.

This panel discussion highlighted the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in meeting U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce child mortality and to promote child health and well being.

Panelists included Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Center for Health and Global Environment; Sigrid Hahn, associate director of Mount Sinai Global Health Center; Montira J. Pngsiri, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and Erika Vohman, director of The Equilibrium Fund.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hr 23 mins, 95.8 MB)

Biodiversity at AMNH: Become a Bee Watcher This Spring

Thursday, March 11 5:00 pm

HONEY BEES Compared to bumble bees, honey bees are lanky and lean. They can be golden or dark brown. One distinguishing characteristic: hairy eyes. © John Ascher

The Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC), in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, is looking for volunteer bee watchers in all five boroughs for its Great Pollinator Project this spring and summer. Now in its fourth year, the program is tracking the pollination patterns of five categories of New York City’s native bees— bumble bees, honey bees, green metallic bees, carpenter bees, and “others” for the rest —with a view to conserving and improving bee habitat and plant pollination.

“By having all those different eyes out there, we are able to collect a lot more data than we ever could ourselves,” says Liz Johnson, CBC manager of the Metropolitan Biodiversity Program, who works on the Great Pollinator Project with Ed Toth, director of the Department of Parks & Recreation’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC), and Kevin Matteson, an urban ecologist at Fordham University.

Would-be New York City bee watchers are asked to complete a brief orientation, transplant an annual sunflower and six native plants to a sunny location, and watch for bees for half an hour at least once every two weeks, then submit their observations online. If a volunteer doesn’t have a suitable outdoor spot for the plants, they are encouraged to visit public gardens or parks and record observations there. Researchers are interested in how frequently bees visit specific flowers to determine what plants and habitats best support the healthy bee populations so vital to pollination—a process without which wild and garden plants might produce small or less fertile seeds or no seeds at all, with serious implications for the ecosystem.

“Ninety percent of plants require an animal pollinator, and bees are the primary pollinator in the Northeast,” says Johnson. “Different bee species have unique adaptations specifically for carrying pollen. Butterflies, wasps, flies, and beetles also pollinate, but they are generally considered less efficient at moving pollen around.”

Aside from enlisting citizen scientists to track and map bee patterns across the city, another goal of the project is to increase public awareness of bees.

“When you talk of bees, people think of the honey bee and maybe the bumble bee,” says Johnson. “But over the years, Museum scientists have documented more than 225 species of bees in the five boroughs.”

To find out more about becoming a bee watcher, visit the Great Pollinator Project or email beewatchers@gmail.com.

A version of this story appears in the March/April issue of Rotunda.

CARPENTER BEES These huge bees have no stripes, like this Xylocopa virginica spotted in Queens’ Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. © John Ascher	GREEN METALLIC BEES This category includes all green bees, such as those with green heads and black abdomens or green heads and striped abdomens, like this female Agapostemon virescens. © John Ascher
AND MORE Other bees buzzing around New York City include leaf-cutter bees, wool carder bees, and giant Asian resin bees like the one above, snapped at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. © John Ascher	BUBMLE BEES Large and fuzzy, Bombus species can be distinguished by their banding patterns. This male Bombus perplexus was photographed last summer in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. © John Ascher

Podcast: International Year of Biodiversity at AMNH

Thursday, February 11 4:23 pm

More than 400 people traipsed through a blizzard to the American Museum of Natural History on February 10 for the North American launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. Ambassadors, Museum Trustees, and other invited guests gathered under the Museum’s famous blue whale which hangs in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. According to Olav Kjørven, assistant secretary-general and director of the Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP, the whale is a spectacular monument to Earth’s life and animals endangered by human activities.

The U.N. designated 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity to raise global awareness of the immense variety of life on Earth and to invite action to safeguard the essential networks on which all life, including humans, depends.

Celebrating the International Year of Biodiversity—and photographed in front of the Spectrum of Life at the American Museum of Natural History—are from left to right Paolo Galizzi (Fordham University School of Law), Marjorie Kaplan (Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc.), Veerle Vandeweerd (UNDP Environment and Energy Group), Ahmed Djoghlaf (Convention on Biological Diversity), Olav Kjørven (UNDP Director of the Bureau for Development Policy), Tran Triet (Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project), Eleanor Sterling (AMNH’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation), Theodore Roosevelt IV (AMNH Board of Trustees), and Carter Ingram (Wildlife Conservation Society). Photo Credit: AMNH/R. Mickens

“We need to refocus the world on biodiversity—the complex tapestry of interconnections at every level that supports life on Earth,” said Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Museum. “We’ve lost sight of the biodiversity crisis because of other global challenges like climate change. But now we need to step back, understand the causes and consequences of our continued impact on life on the planet, and develop realistic and comprehensive strategies that allow dynamic human communities, economies, and life to thrive.”

The partners for this event, which include Conservation International, Fordham University, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Foundation, and Wildlife Conservation Society, agree that stronger commitments need to be secured for biodiversity and the vital ecosystems that sustain life.

The evening opened with comments by Michael Novacek, provost of Science at the Museum, who introduced Mr. Kjørven and Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. A special preview of the premier world television event LIFE, a co-production of BBC and Discovery Channel, was introduced by Marjorie Kaplan, the president and general manager of Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc. A panel discussion including Charles McNeill, UNDP senior policy advisor, Veerle Vandeweerd, UNDP director of the Environment and Energy Group, Tran Triet, representative of the Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project, Paolo Galizzi, Fordham University School of Law, Morten Wetland, Norway’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., and Dr. Sterling followed.

This podcast is the North American launch of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, a designated by the United Nations.  The program, Biodiversity is Life, Biodiversity is Our Life, took place at the Museum on February 10, 2010.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hour 3 mins, 58 MB)