William F. Laurance (United States, 1957) received his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley (United States) in 1989. Currently Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University in Cairns (Australia), he also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University (Netherlands).
Laurance is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Australian Academy of Sciences, and a past president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. His distinctions include the Heineken Environment Prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and the Australian Laureate Fellowship, one of the country’s foremost scientific honors. In 2015, the Zoological Society of London granted him its award for Outstanding Contributions to Nature Conservation.
Author of eight books and over 400 scientific and outreach articles, he has figured several times among the most highly cited scientists in the conservation biology field, and is a four-time winner of Australia’s Best Science Writing Prize.
Speech
Ecology and Conservation Biology, 1st edition
Seen from the sky it is an endless tract of luxuriant land, interspersed with water channels that run through it like brown capillaries coursing through the green. Then suddenly, a human settlement comes into view. Look closer. The land surrounding the town seems to have lost its lush green appearance. It is scored by highways and paths that branch out like a fishbone, and between each spine the land looks barer, poorer, less itself. So, it turns out that the forest is not infinite. It has an end. And here something is eating it away from within, driven by the needs of a distant world – Europe, the United States, emerging Asia – hungry for oil and timber, for biofuel and soy crops.
The first to conduct a large-scale scientific analysis of the creeping damage being done were two U.S. biologists: Thomas Lovejoy, research associate at the prestigious Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and holder of the biodiversity chair at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and William Laurance, likewise of the STRI. The immense Amazonian forest that fascinated Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana in the 16th century, and is, even now, home to scores of uncontacted ethnic groups, “is perilously close to the point of no return,” warns Lovejoy. “Ecosystem degradation is advancing much faster than we imagined, though we must take hope from the ambitious conservation initiatives that are now starting up.”
The Amazon rainforest occupies over five million square kilometers and is a paradise of biodiversity. One out of every ten known plant and animal species is found within its confines – at least 4,000 plant species, 3,000 fishes, some 1,300 birds, and around 1,500 mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Many more remain unknown. “It’s the only place in the world where you can see jaguars, eagles, tapirs… all these magnificent creatures in their natural environment,” enthuses Laurance.
In the 1970s, Thomas Lovejoy decided to study how the forest was coping with a problem that was already heading the list of threats to planetary ecosystems: habitat fragmentation. He launched the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), a joint venture between the Smithsonian and Brazil’s Amazonian Research Institute which is the largest study, in space and duration, ever conducted on fragmented jungle habitat. Bill Laurance is the project’s most productive researcher with over 270 publications to his name in leading scientific journals, along with a steady output of educational articles.
The BDFFP covers an area of more than 1,000 km2. It takes in vast stretches of intact Amazonia, as well as numerous forest plots of between 1 and 100 hectares which have been progressively isolated from the surrounding forest by clearcutting and pastureland. BDFFP researchers censused all these area for trees, birds, primates, small mammals, amphibians and insects both before deforestation – from 1979 to 1983 – and after, at regular intervals. The result is an invaluable resource: a catalogue of the species present, and their abundance, prior to deforestation. This may seem at first sight a meager outcome, but given the huge complexity of topical ecosystems, allied with the rarity and patchy distribution of many of their inhabitants, such an information-gathering effort is a massive achievement and a vindication of this pioneering experiment.
Analysis of these data has also yielded up new findings. For example, Laurance and Lovejoy have discovered that the changes taking place on the edges of artificially fragmented plots are rippling out across an unexpectedly large area, with impacts being detected over a distance of some 10 km. Moreover, changes in the natural microclimates of forest remnants trigger a dramatic rise in tree mortality, especially among the tallest specimens. And when a big tree dies in Amazonia, it takes with it a marvelously complex vertical ecosystem, a honeycomb of ecological niches as densely constructed as the Manhattan skyscrapers – only, in this case, skyscrapers that house a different animal or plant species in each of their apartments. Tree death, therefore, means a serious loss of biomass.
The BDFFP project has also helped settle a long debate among conservation experts
Is it better to protect numerous small areas or a single large one? The BDFFP has shown that in forest patches of around a hundred hectares, bird species plummet in a bare 15 years, which supports the case for keeping large extents of forest intact.
Another recent finding involves mathematical models to simulate how the forest will cope depending on the kind of conservation – or non-conservation – policies applied. In the article “The Future of Amazon Brazil,” published in Science in 2001, Laurance wrote: “The Brazilian Amazon is currently experiencing the world’s highest absolute rate of forest destruction (…). We developed two computer models that integrate spatial data on deforestation, logging, mining, highways and roads, navigable rivers, vulnerability to wildfires, protected areas, and existing and planned infrastructure projects, in an effort to predict the condition of Brazilian Amazonian forests by the year 2020. Both models suggest that the region’s forests will be drastically altered by current development schemes and land-use trends over the next 20 years.”
2020; in other words, just around the corner. What will happen to the rest of the world if Amazonia ceases to exist? “It will mark a big contribution to climate change, as well as a tragic loss of biological diversity,” responds Lovejoy. With deforestation, the carbon stored in living organisms is released into the atmosphere. Simulations suggest that in the Amazon alone, this process may be pumping 150 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every single year, equivalent to the carbon output of the whole United Kingdom.
Is there some way to halt the damage? Lovejoy and Laurance know that the causes of deforestation are no more locally confined than its effects. This is why they pitch their researcher training program and their campaigning efforts at regional and international level. The BDFFP has long been a training ground for dozens of environmental scientists and managers, some of whom now hold positions of power with a say in the future of Amazonia. Their message is clear: “Directly or directly, we all play a part in deforestation when we consume oil or wood …,” says Laurance. “It is not just the local countries but all of us who must make an effort. This is something that concerns us all. We need to stop deforestation now.”
