̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - rainforest

Cambridge on World Environment Day 2024

plc32 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 06:01:21 +0000

This year's World Environment Day focus is on land restoration. So we spoke with three Cambridge researchers working on reviving landscapes, boosting biodiversity, and collaborating with communities to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Bats to the rescue

ta385 — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 08:00:00 +0000

READ THE STORY HERE

A new study shows that bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, a Cambridge zoologist believes, can ease the pressure on farmers to turn rainforest into fields.

Courtesy of Adrià López-Baucells

Peters' wrinkle-lipped bat.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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‘Keep it local’ approach to protecting the rainforest can be more effective than government schemes

sc604 — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the ̽��ֱ�� of East Anglia (UEA) and the Peruvian Ministry of Environment assessed the effectiveness of different approaches to conservation in the Peruvian Amazon between 2006 and 2011. They found that while all were effective at protecting the rainforest compared with non-protected areas of land, the areas protected by local and indigenous communities were on average more effective than those protected by the government.

However, the effectiveness of the conservation strategies also depended on what non-protected areas they were compared to, and the land use restrictions in place in the non-protected land. Future assessments of the impacts of different conservation strategies should therefore pay closer attention to land use restrictions in place in non-protected lands. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

Although the Amazon rainforest and its unique biodiversity are rapidly disappearing, little is still known about which protection mechanisms make a difference and how different conservation strategies compare.

̽��ֱ��study looked at areas protected by the national government, indigenous communities or civil society and the private sector are, compared to non-protected areas and land destined for timber and mineral extraction. ̽��ֱ��researchers assessed each approach for how well it was able to curtail deforestation, defined as total forest cover loss, and forest degradation, defined as other human-induced disturbances, such as selective logging, logging tracks and fire.

̽��ֱ��researchers combined remote sensing data with environmental and socio-economic datasets to assess each approach, and controlled for other factors that are expected to affect deforestation and forest degradation.

“Our results that these diverse types of protected areas were effective at reducing deforestation and forest degradation compared to non-protected areas are very encouraging,” said lead author Dr Judith Schleicher, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography. ̽��ֱ��larger reduction in deforestation and forest degradation in areas led by indigenous communities and grassroots groups suggests that local ownership and support for protecting the Peruvian Amazon can be a particularly effective approach.

“Policy makers must focus on a more diverse set of mechanisms for protecting the rapidly disappearing tropical forests,” said Schleicher. “Our analysis shows that local stewardship of the forest can be very effective at curtailing forest degradation and conversion in the Peruvian Amazon. Local conservation initiatives deserve more political, financial and legal support than they currently receive.”

“Our analysis shows that there is no single way of protecting tropical forests, and multiple approaches are required to stem the relentless tide of forest conversion and degradation,” said co-author Professor Carlos Peres from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences.

̽��ֱ��research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Cambridge Political Economy Society, Cambridge Philosophical Society, St John’s College, and the Department of Geography.

Reference:
Judith Schleicher et al. ‘Conservation performance of different conservation governance regimes in the Peruvian Amazon.’ Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-10736-w

Conservation initiatives led by local and indigenous groups can be just as effective as schemes led by government, according to new research. In some cases in the Amazon rainforest, grassroots initiatives can be even more effective at protecting this vital ecosystem. This is particularly important due to widespread political resistance to hand over control over forests and other natural resources to local communities.

Policy makers must focus on a more diverse set of mechanisms for protecting the rapidly disappearing tropical forests.

Judith Schleicher

Anna & Michal

In Peruvian Amazon Rainforest

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Was the dawn of man among trees in the cradle of disease?

fpjl2 — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 08:22:23 +0000

When the family of Albert Perry - a recently deceased African-American man from South Carolina - sent a sample of his DNA to be tested by a genealogy website, they weren’t expecting to rewrite the history of mankind. They were probably just a bit curious.

But Perry’s DNA contained a Y chromosome not seen before, one which potentially reveals that the last common male ancestor in the paternal line of humanity is almost twice as old as previously thought – some 338,000 years, even though the oldest fossil of man is only 195,000 years old.

̽��ֱ��DNA was traced back to the Mbo ethnic group in central Africa, based primarily in South West Cameroon, suggesting that the dawn of modern man took place deep in the inhospitable forests of this region rather than the savannahs of East Africa, the area that conventional science has – until now – located as the site of the first homo sapiens.

This Friday, a student-run conference hosted by Cambridge’s Biological Anthropology Division will focus on this groundbreaking research, published earlier this year by a team from the ̽��ֱ�� of Arizona and UCL, to ask some of the major questions it raises: How might this change our understanding of human evolution? Does the forest still influence who we are today?

Relocating Origin will feature experts from Cambridge and elsewhere, including one of the UCL scientists who conducted the original research, Professor Mark Thomas, and will be available to watch through a live webcast.

“This is a hugely exciting time for human origin studies. If these early findings are proved correct, the current narratives of the beginning of our species have been predicated on a different location and a different time!” says Katie Fitzpatrick, a PhD candidate in the Department and one of the conference organisers.

“ ̽��ֱ��hot, humid forests work against fossil preservation as they just decay in such climates – unlike arid regions that have been the focus of early human research so far. However, the evidence may still be in the rainforests but we haven’t been looking”.

By asking ‘What if Adam lived in the forest?’ scientists will explore the implications not just for genetics but human culture, technology and society.

̽��ֱ��impact of a forest home on the social structure of the first homo sapiens will be examined by the Division’s Dr Peter Walsh, who researches social networks in primate ecology. A major theme of the conference will be what’s known as Behavioural Immune System hypothesis – the idea that social behaviour is an intrinsic part of the immune system, and infectious disease transmission can dictate social contact, especially in the heart of Africa.

“ ̽��ֱ��forest region of central Africa is the disease epicentre of the universe! HIV from chimps, bats carrying rabies, Ebola, SARS, insect vectors carrying malaria and parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantitis, loads of fecal-oral diseases… It’s described as ‘pathogen rain’,” says Walsh.

“You live in a big group with lots of social interaction, and one of you gets Ebola – everybody dies. So it doesn’t make evolutionary sense in such places”.

Walsh suggests that the region’s ‘pathogen rain’ could have stunted early human development, as limited interactions due to fear of disease meant that ideas and innovations were unable to spread and build, leaving our first ancestors languishing in the forest for thousands of years.

“In disease hotbeds, people have much stronger group identification, which makes them much more hostile – part of the behavioural immune system. You see the same in gorillas.”

One possible theory Walsh will discuss is that, instead of a “key innovation” – such as walking upright or fire - triggering human development, just getting out of the disease-riddled forests could have allowed for much greater social interaction that sparked a “cascade of technological innovation”.

And it is a much more recent human innovation opening up these possibilities. We now live in the age of ‘big data’. ̽��ֱ��access to unprecedented reams of digital information is transforming almost every area of academic research in tandem with society in general: “This capacity to have genetic samples from vast numbers of people is giving us a whole new view of why we are the way we are, and this is only the start,” says Walsh.

While the evolutionary scientists stress that much more research needs to be done in the region, which presents all manner of challenges from unfavourable climates for fossilized evidence to political instability, the conference will be the first to look at the emergence of this brand new direction in the field, and how it can be taken “from speculation to science”.

“Certain methodologies need to be nailed down, which will take a few years, but this avenue of investigation could lead to the reassessment of a huge range of thinking around fire, meat-eating, bipedalism, locomotion – when and how these things happened are all potentially up for discussion,” adds Walsh.

“What we want to ask is how this might change things, to get people to start thinking about the possibility that the last fifty years of research has been mistaken in its assumptions about where we came from.”

For a full list of speakers and topics, and a link to the live webcast of the conference, go to http://relocatingorigin.soc.srcf.net/

Inset image: Dr Peter Walsh

A student-led conference to be webcast live will ask, in light of recent research, whether the story of human origin is radically different from established thinking, and what that might mean for everything from genetics to the birth of culture.

̽��ֱ��forest region of central Africa is the disease epicentre of the universe… It’s described as ‘pathogen rain’

Peter Walsh

Peter Walsh. Banner image credit Strollerdos

Forest region of South West Cameroon

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Rainforest remedy could spell end of dental pain

sjr81 — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:40:18 +0000

̽��ֱ��remedy, made from an Amazonian plant species from varieties of Acmella Oleracea and turned into a gel for medical use, has proved hugely successful during the first two phases of clinical trials and may hasten the end of current reliance on local anaesthetics in dental use and Non-Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) in specific applications.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� anthropologist Dr Françoise Barbira Freedman, the first westerner to be invited to live with the Keshwa Lamas in Amazonian Peru, is leading efforts to bring this wholly natural painkiller to the global marketplace as an organic alternative to synthetic painkillers.

In doing so, the company she founded, Ampika Ltd (a spin-out from Cambridge Enterprise, the ̽��ֱ��’s commercialisation arm) will be run according to strict ethical guidelines, and will be able to channel a percentage of any future profits back to the Keshwa Lamas community who agreed to share their expertise with her.

With no known side-effects during the past five years of Phase I and II trials, Dr Freedman, who has continued to visit and live among the Keshwa Lamas over the past 30 years, is confident the stringent Phase III trials (multi-location trials across a diverse population mix) will be the final hurdle to clear. If successful, Ampika’s plan is to bring the product to market in 2014/15.

She said: “ ̽��ֱ��story began in 1975 when I first went to live among the indigenous people of Peru. We were trekking through the rainforest and I was having terrible trouble with my wisdom teeth. One of the men with me noticed and prepared a little wad of plants to bite onto. ̽��ֱ��pain went away. When it came back a few hours later, he had foreseen the need and kept plant material in his hunters’ bag for me.

“I forgot all about the wisdom teeth problem for many years until Cambridge-based neuroscientist Dr Mark Treherne asked me to bring some medicinal plant samples back in order to test them for neurological research. Almost as an afterthought I remembered to include the one I’d used on my teeth. It was added to the bottom of the list, but somehow the list got reversed and it was the first one tested back in the UK. It was immediately successful and we’ve never looked back.

“During the time I have spent with the Keshwa Lamas I’ve learnt all about the different plants and leaves they use for everyday illnesses and ailments. I first went to Peru as a young researcher hoping to learn more about what was a secretive community who were experts in shamanism. Along the way I’ve learnt a great deal about natural medicines and remedies; everything from toothache to childbirth.”

“This treatment for toothache means we could be looking at the end of some injections in the dentist’s surgery. We’ve had really clear result from the tests so far, particularly for peridodontological procedures such as root scaling and planing, and there are many other potential applications. ̽��ֱ��native forest people described to me exactly how the medicine could and should work and they were absolutely right. There are a range of mucous tissue applications it could benefit, and may even help bowel complaints such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).”

̽��ֱ��Keshwa Lamas remedy represents the first clinical trial of a natural product in Peru using the International Convention of Clinical Trials, of which Peru is a signatory, the gold-standard for clinical trials that is recognised across the Pacific and Atlantic regions.

Dr Freedman, who will visit the Peruvian community again in the coming weeks, has already been able to channel some early funding to the Keshwa Lama to help in the creation of a medicinal plant garden to conserve plants and plant knowledge related to women’s health and maternity care – with the express aim of preserving wisdom for future generations.

She added: “We think the remedy is better than current treatments because NSAID drugs are systemic and have long-term effects; the plant product is not systemic and does not have any known side-effects. We think people prefer to use natural products and this is particularly the case for baby teething – for which, to my knowledge, there is no clinically tested natural alternative.”

̽��ֱ��dentists who carried out the Phase 2 trial reported a high level of satisfaction among their patients who disliked injections and did not need to use painkillers after the periodontological procedures.

There was also a higher rate of patient return for further appointments than average for the group with which the plant gel was used. ̽��ֱ��gel works by blocking nerve endings (sodium channel pathways).

Ampika has a portfolio of plant-based drug development, particularly related to women’s health conditions and Type 2 diabetes, which it hopes to develop in the coming years.

An ancient Incan toothache remedy – for centuries handed down among an indigenous people in the rainforests of Peru – could be on the cusp of revolutionising worldwide dental practice.

During the time I have spent with the Keshwa Lamas I’ve learnt all about the different plants and leaves they use for everyday illnesses and ailments.

Dr Françoise Barbira Freedman

̽��ֱ��plant used in the rainforest remedy

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