T. Mitchell Aide
1- What drew you to the field of Tropical Biology?
As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time in the library reading journals and magazines about natural history and the tropics. In the late 1970s, there were reports of extensive deforestation in the tropics. For the first time, rather than depending on government reports, researchers had access to unbiased satellite images, and they discovered that deforestation in the tropics was more extensive than previously reported. Images of deforestation and fires in the Amazon were shocking for me. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I traveled through Mexico and Central America, hoping to find a project in the tropics that needed a field assistant.
While in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, I was told that there was a new project in Panama that needed assistants. Fortunately for me, Steve Hubbell ignored the rules, brought me to Barro Colorado Island (BCI), and I started working with him and Robin Foster the next day. The experience of living on BCI for a year, helping establish the 50-hectare plot, and interacting with professors and graduate students from around the world, hooked me on tropical ecology.
Lissy Coley was one of the >100 scientists I met during my year-long stay at BCI. She was a postdoc and had just received a position at the University of Utah. Fortunately, I convinced her to take me on as her first graduate student. Lissy, and her husband, Tom Kursar, were excellent mentors. They always pushed for the highest level of science but also made time for other activities and introduced me to backcountry skiing and kayaking.
2- What are exciting research developments that happened in Tropical Biology during your career?
It is hard to believe, but I was on BCI when the first Apple computer arrived. Over the last 40 years, technological changes have brought an abundance of new tools for tropical biologists, which has changed how, where, and what we study. The increasing capacity and decrease in costs of data storage and computational capacity changed everything. We have transitioned from doing statistics on a calculator to running global models, sending letters, proposals, and manuscripts by mail rather than email, and searching for articles in a library versus the internet. The advent of GIS led to the new subdiscipline of landscape ecology. Advances in molecular biology completely upended population genetics and systematics and have provided new tools such as eDNA to assist in identifying species. Remote sensing, particularly satellite imagery, provided a unique perspective that allowed us to work at larger spatial scales, and today provides data at a global scale virtually in real-time. The miniaturization/digitalization of sensors, e.g., camera traps, acoustic sensors, and wildlife tracking tags, allows us access to the location and behavior of organisms 24 hr/d without being present. These tools have produced more data than we could have ever imagined (or analyze). Unfortunately, more data on more species from more sites have not reduced the habitat loss or population decline across the tropics.
3- What is your favorite memory of fieldwork?
Often the best memories were traveling to and from field sites: boating down a river in the Amazon, hiking through an Andean cloud forest, or visiting a new country, but the most memorable experiences were on field courses. Some were scary. In Bloody Basin, Arizona, one of the most beautiful areas of the Sonoran Desert, two idiots shot >100 rounds at/over/too close to students and professors on a desert field course. Fortunately, no blood was spilled. On another field course, at Katios National Park, Colombia, the arrival of a group of guerrillas made for some tense moments, but fortunately, they were more interested in eating and washing clothes than kidnapping any students. Most field courses were filled with positive experiences, like being the teaching assistant on a 10-day tour of the Galapagos. My most memorable experience has been participating in 16 Latin American OTS ecology and conservation courses, where I had the opportunity to meet >300 students.
4- What accomplishment are you and/or your research team most proud of?
During the last 15 years, most of my research has focused on land use change in Latin America and acoustic biodiversity monitoring. In both cases, we produced an online platform for data storage and analyses. For the land use research, we produced the Land Mapper platform for classifying satellite imagery. One of the products of this effort was a Biotropica article, Deforestation and Reforestation of Latin America and the Caribbean (2001–2010), (Aide et al 2013). The platform was critical for other large-scale studies on agriculture (Graesser et al. 2015), gold mining (Alvarez-Berrios and Aide 2015), and oil palm expansion (Furumo and Aide 2017), among others. An integral part of the platform was Google Earth. We used it for producing training data for classifying satellite imagery. In December 2014, the Google Earth API was deprecated, and Google Earth Engine replaced most of the functionalities of Land Mapper.
To improve biodiversity monitoring, we developed the Automated Remote Biodiversity Monitoring Network (ARBIMON). This platform facilitates storage and analyses of audio recordings and provides tools for soundscape analyses and creating species-specific identification models. Presently, there are models for >2,500 species of birds, frogs, mammals, and insects. The platform is hosted by Rainforest Connection (https://arbimon.rfcx.org).
These platforms could not have been developed without the collaboration of Carlos Corrada-Bravo and his computer science students.
5- What role did the ATBC play in your career?
As a student, at your first meeting, asking questions or approaching a well-known scientist can be intimidating. At my first ATBC meeting, I was interested in gap dynamics, and I had read papers by Julie Denslow and Miguel Martinez-Ramos. I remember nervously approaching them to ask questions about their research and hopefully tell them about my research plans. Both were incredibly friendly and willing to spend time talking with a student. Since that first meeting many years ago, ATBC has always felt like family.
6- What is your advice to a young scientist starting to work on tropical systems?
Take your time, there is a lot to learn, and one cannot do it in three or four years. Classes, projects, and collaborations all add to your foundation for the rest of your career. It would help if you took advantage of this period in your career to work on a diversity of projects. Find out what motivates you. Just because your first experience as a field assistant was working with birds does not mean you must stick with this line of research for the rest of your career. Ecological systems are complex, and a broad foundation will be invaluable as an advisor and collaborator. And don’t forget to learn the language where you are working.
Carlos Jaramillo
1- What drew you to your field of study?
I investigate the evolution of tropical landscape and its biomes at diverse scales of time and space. Having been born and raised in Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, I was fascinated with the tropics since childhood. Furthermore, I was often in the field, especially along creeks looking for fossils and all kinds of rocks. Therefore, my natural course in life was becoming a paleontologist, what else could I do? How else could I understand why the tropics are the way they are?
2- What are exciting research developments that happened in your field during your career?
The paleontological research in tropical latitudes has grown exponentially over the past 20 years yielding several insights. For instance, we have discovered that tropical diversity increases during global warming and decreases during cooling at both, geologically short (10-100 thousand years) and long-time intervals (2-4 million years). We have also learned that the modern lowland tropical rainforest started at the onset of the Cenozoic, 66 million years ago and that the Cretaceous tropical forests were quite different, and probably there are no modern analogs. Also. we have found that many neotropical biomes are very young, evolving only over the last 5-10 million years (e.g., lowland savannas, xerophytic forests, paramo/Puna). And lastly, it has become evident that the pollen record can solve all your problems!
3- What is your favorite memory of fieldwork?
I have been lucky enough to do tons of fieldwork across many different habitats, and I could tell you lots of stories. I recall once walking in the Chilean altiplano at 4000 meters of elevation with a geological hammer in my hand while being chased by a lightning storm and realizing that I was the tallest object in the landscape and the only one with a metallic object.
4- What accomplishment are you and/or your research team most proud of?
It was really a crazy idea to think that I could make a living by being a paleontologist, that is difficult enough if you are born in USA or Europe, but even more difficult if you are born in Colombia, where the investment in Science is at a bare minimum. However, I could not imagine myself doing anything else in my life. My bet has paid off so far, and now we have a large, vibrant team of young scientists, many of whom are already faculty professors or doing research at private enterprises (U. Zurich, Chicago Field Museum, U. Eafit, U. del Norte, U. Rosario, U. Michigan, U. of Fribourg, BP, Exxon, Ecopetrol) and many students. Collectively, we have demonstrated to ourselves that we can do high-quality science at the global level.
5- What role did the ATBC and/or other Scientific Associations play in your career?
The scientific associations are critical to our existence as we often work on obscure themes that most of humanity does not even know exist. The associations are the only opportunity to be in contact with people as weird as us to share and discuss ideas, develop research projects, and find friends for life. ATBC in particular has been very useful, in fact, one of the first articles that I published (22 years ago) was in Biotropica about the mangroves of the Utria National Natural Park in the Pacific of Colombia. This paper was very useful for my professional career as I learned a lot from the entire publication process.
6- What is your advice to a young scientist starting to work on tropical systems?
Programming must be part of your basic tool of expertise, a third language (first your native language, second English, and third programming). Here, I do not advise you to become an expert programmer but to have a working knowledge of programming (e.g., Phyton, MySQL, R, using batch).
Fieldwork, fieldwork, and more fieldwork. The tropic is a complex system and by sitting in front of a computer, you may lose the sense of reality and how difficult the tropics are. You may even start believing that you have a solution to your question, but a couple of weeks in the field will bring you back to your feet.
I know there is high pressure to publish as fast as possible, but the tropics require lots of data, so have a bit of patience and increase your sample size. The end result will be much better.