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.