Peruvian biologist and researcher Pedro Vasquez Ruestra will give a free public talk at 7 p.m. Thursday at the International Wildlife Film Festival and Media Center, 718 S. Higgins Ave. Ruestra's talk, � Years of Conservation Biology in Peru,” will be followed by a free showing of the award-winning wildlife film, “The Amazon River.”
Demand for the wood product is so great in the United States that a mature tree is worth $50,000. And like the ivory tusks of elephants, the increasingly rare trees are hunted and harvested by poachers even in protected areas, said Pedro Vasquez Ruestra, one of the most influential conservation scientists in Latin America - and beyond.
Ruestra is in Missoula this week talking with University of Montana students and faculty to further a fledgling international collaboration between UM and Peru's Center of Data for Conservation, which Ruestra directs, and the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina in Lima, where he serves as director of the Department of Forestry Management.
South of the equator, Ruestra is regarded as a leading researcher and voice for the conservation of natural resources in protected areas, forestry management and GIS mapping. In the greater world, he speaks on behalf of his native Peru, which is the most biologically diverse and important area on the face of the globe for biodiversity, said Erick Greene, a UM biology professor.
In Missoula, Ruestra is the main reason UM's three-year-old field class “Tropical Ecology - from the Andes to the Amazon” is thriving.
The exotic class is the centerpiece of UM's unique program, which combines an equal number of American and Peruvian students and American and Peruvian faculty.
“What makes this course so unique is the makeup of the people in it,” Greene said. “There are plenty of courses around the country in tropical biology, but there aren't any I know of that are an international collaboration and one that interacts with the local people.”
Book knowledge and map studying get a real-world jolt, as this course starts at the crest of the Andes, where students learn about cloud forests, and winds up in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, where they travel by dugout canoes into some of the most remote places left on Earth, Greene said.
During their journey, students get a deeper understanding of how indigenous Peruvians live and interact with the country's rich natural world, and how the government does or does not manage this resource.
It makes sense that Peruvian students interested in biology, conservation and ecology study the ecosystems in their own country, Ruestra said. And it makes sense that more Americans do, too.
“The world is getting smaller all of the time, and borders between countries are falling,” Ruestra said. “It is important for people in other regions and other parts of the world to have knowledge and opinions regarding how all these life forms interact, because we are all interconnected.
“We have learned, for example, that it really doesn't make any sense to save bird habitat in Alaska, when those bird populations migrate to the tropics, without doing the same habitat protection work in the tropics.”
While conservation efforts are filled with gloomy stories, such as the at-risk mahogany trees, there are success stories in Peru that energize hope and serve, perhaps, as success models for other countries, Greene said.
The wild vicuna, a small llamalike creature that lives in the Andes and was hunted to near extinction in the 1960s, has made a vibrant comeback because the communities that need the animal for meat and wool have learned how to manage the wild populations, Ruestra said.
Same is true for the story of the side-neck turtle and the paiche tropical freshwater fish. Hunted to the point of endangerment, communities that live in and around these creatures have been educated on the finer points of management and selective harvest, and now those populations are bouncing back.
The success stories enrich human and animal populations alike; we all benefit from thoughtful, well-researched conservation efforts, Ruestra said.
“Conservation is a slow, long process,” he said. “But it is also very fragile work that needs to be monitored. It is necessary for people of different regions to know about all of these efforts, and to ask - or demand - that they are being monitored and tended to.”
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com
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