Rainforest Trust honored Curt Vander Meer with an award recognizing his leadership in conservation on December 8th as part of our 30th Anniversary Celebration and Species Legacy Auction. The award was given to celebrate his vision and commitment to global conservation.

Vander Meer is CEO of Indianapolis-based Endangered Species Chocolate (ESC), a premium fairtrade chocolate company that supports conservation efforts worldwide by “giving back” 10% of their profits annually. Under Curt’s leadership, in the past three years they have given $1.4 million to protect endangered species and habitats, with Rainforest Trust being one of their GiveBack partners. ESC became a supporter of Rainforest Trust in 2016, formalizing their participation in the Conservation Circle — our corporate giving sponsorship program — this year at the Chairman’s level. ESC has given over $500,000 towards Rainforest Trust projects thus far, saving rainforest land greater than the size of Indianapolis.

“We are indebted to Curt and Endangered Species Chocolate not just for their support of our important work, but also for their commitment and leadership in regards to sustainability,” said Rainforest Trust CEO Paul Salaman. “ESC walks the walk in regards to conservation, doing so much to save species at risk and care for our planet.”

The award given to Vander Meer recognizes his conservation leadership at ESC, but also his dedication to environmental sustainability writ large. Vander Meer is a passionate conservationist, and along with his wife Lisa, purchased the naming rights to a Colombian frog during our Species Legacy Auction. The event auctioned off the naming rights to 12 new to science species found in reserves created by Rainforest Trust and our local partners, and earned $182,500 total towards saving these species and their habitat.

“Endangered Species Chocolate has a 25 year history of supporting and generating awareness of conservation efforts. Our brand promise is to give back 10% of our annual net profits to organizations, such as Rainforest Trust, for the protection of species and habitats. I am honored to be receiving this recognition on behalf of the whole Endangered Species Team. Each of our employees are committed to the cause of conservation and making a difference in our world.”

Rainforest Trust’s work to protect habitats for threatened species is grounded in cutting-edge conservation science. But in this series, we explore the basics of conservation science and how they inform Rainforest Trust’s scientists.

As I was trying to think of a way to explain the concept of species distribution, I struggled to find the right analogy. Species distribution is essentially just where a species lives, but the nuances are important for conservation decision-makers. And the nuances are weird and specific — especially when it comes to habitat fragmentation, or the splitting up of species’ distributions into smaller chunks.

So I wrestled with how to properly explain how frustrating distribution can be for conservation scientists. Until I found another frustrating medium that has many of the same properties.

See, species distribution is a tortilla chip.

In this (not perfect) metaphor, let’s imagine that guacamole is the population size of a species. More guacamole = bigger population of a species.

“Wildlife and their geographic range.”

With me? Great.

What is guacamole’s natural habitat? In the brief instance in which this metaphor is useful, the moment between dipping and chewing, the natural habitat of the guacamole is the tortilla chip. The guacamole relies on the tortilla chip, without the tortilla chip, the guacamole will never make it (to you).

Before our intervention, tortilla chips are full triangles or circles, capable of sustaining a massive heap of guacamole. Pleasant amounts of lime, red onion and avocado can go from bowl to mouth in peace. But, as anyone who has opened a bag of tortilla chips can tell you, this harmony doesn’t last.

Tortilla chips, with too much human interference, break in two. When they do, these smaller fragments don’t support half of the original guacamole volume. Smaller tortilla chips bring in less guacamole proportional to their size, reducing the total guacamole volume scooped per square inch of tortilla chip surface area. As these pieces grow smaller and smaller, it becomes more difficult to support a meaningful level of guacamole. Eventually, the pieces will become useless to the guacamole.

Tortilla chips before becoming unusable, tiny pieces.

Still with me? Awesome.

We also have to account for your thumb space in picking up guacamole. The more tortilla chip surface area your thumb covers, the less guacamole you’ll scoop. This is the effective size of the tortilla chip.

The shape of the tortilla chip also matters. A circular tortilla chip has the proportional viability to hold a heap of guacamole right in the middle. But a long, skinny tortilla chip of the same size will support less guacamole than the circular chip. You could try to pick up the same volume of guacamole, but it will keep falling off the edges.

We should also take into account the structural viability of the tortilla chip. A good tortilla chip can pile on mountains of guacamole. A sub-standard tortilla chip will break with just a hint of tension.

Conservation scientists look at geographic range by taking into account the surface area of the tortilla chips and the effective size of the tortilla chips. They further evaluate these factors by the shape, structural viability and size of the tortilla chip.

I will now try to dig out of this unending metaphor.

The surface area of the tortilla chip is the “extent of occurrence.” This is complicated, so let’s use another metaphor to explain this already convoluted metaphor. Imagine a house with many unused rooms. While the entire house exists as habitat, in reality, only a few rooms are occupied. The whole house is the “extent of occurrence,” the used rooms are what’s known as the “area of occupancy.”

The “area of occupancy” is the actual space the species uses. To bring it back to the tortilla chips, some areas (covered by the thumb) aren’t home to any guacamole. Species don’t live in every corner of their “extent of occurrence,” but they do live in every corner of their “area of occupancy.” So the thumb space would be included in the “extent of occurrence” but not the “area of occupancy.”

Does the giraffe live in every part of this landscape or just part of it? The difference is the difference between “extent of occurrence” and “area of occupancy,” respectively.

Species need safeguards from random catastrophes — like a disease or a fire. If the entire species lives in one field and that field succumbs to a sinkhole, the species is no longer. If the species lives in three fields and one field succumbs to a sinkhole, two habitats remain.

So, on a basic level, the larger the extent of occurrence and area of occupancy, the more chance a species has to make it past a catastrophe.

The shape of the protected habitat (the shape of the tortilla chip) is also important. Protected areas suffer from the “edge effects,” meaning protected land right next to unprotected land will suffer from external influence more than protected land far away from unprotected land. A circle has more area away from the border than something long and skinny, meaning more habitat further from unprotected areas.

The size of the protected habitat (the size of the individual tortilla chips) is important as well. If you had one contiguous tortilla chip and broke it up into many smaller tortilla chips, we would support less guacamole. Same goes with habitat. We call this phenomenon habitat fragmentation. Small patches of habitat have more “edge” areas and less contiguous space, supporting fewer individuals. This also fragments populations, which can lead to inbreeding.

The quality of the habitat (the structural viability of the tortilla chip) defines how many individuals a habitat can support, or carry. Some habitats can support many individuals and species, and some don’t have the same carrying capacity.

A city park, because it is smaller and prone to more disturbance will probably support a lower level of biodiversity than a vast, undisturbed landscape.

To close, I will surrender to this metaphorical quagmire.

The point of a protected area for wildlife is to support large, contiguous and sturdy tortilla chips. Rainforest Trust keeps this idea in mind with every protected area. We’ve protected both large, contiguous areas in themselves in addition to securing gaps between areas to create new vast stretches of protected land.

Because without practical chips, we have no guacamole and the consequences of breaking our bag of tortilla chips (the planet) into tiny, frustrating pieces are dire.

So let’s stop guacamole from going extinct.

Rainforest Trust’s work to protect habitats for threatened species is grounded in cutting-edge conservation science. But in this series, we explore the basics of conservation science and how they inform Rainforest Trust’s scientists.

We know why the chicken crossed the road: to get to the other side. But what was on the other side?

The proverbial chicken crossed the road, motivated by its desire to get to the proverbial “other side.” We assume the chicken made this decision of its own volition and made it with purpose. Like all heroes, The Great Explorer Chicken had a choice: stay put or face the unknown. And, like all heroes, the chicken chose the unknown, battling dangers of the road to seek the dream of the other side’s brighter tomorrow. To remember this inspiring feat, we’ve etched the chicken’s infamous bravery into the annals of history.

I first reflected on the motivations of the iconic chicken after witnessing a Helmeted Guineafowl cross a road between Mto wa Mbu and Arusha in northern Tanzania. A Helmeted Guineafowl, while not a chicken, is chickenesque. I was zipping along the road in a car. The guineafowl was in the roadside brush until, like a scene out of Frogger, it ignored the oncoming hazards moving perpendicular to its trajectory and bolted.

The Helmeted Guineafowl: A Chickenesque Species

But why?

On the north side of the road were buildings, homes and a sufficiency of cows: a human-dominated landscape. On the south side was a private ranch, managed for both wildlife and cattle. Cattle grazing occurred on the outskirts of the property and wildlife abounded in the center, including guineafowl.

As the guineafowl crossed from protected area to unprotected area, it passed from one habitat to another habitat. It did not cross from habitat to “not habitat.” Habitat is the space where living things live, so everywhere is habitat because living things live everywhere. Just as the Serengeti is habitat, the tracks of the New York City subway are habitat. In fact, subway tracks are suitable habitat for the Brown Rat.

“Habitat”

But the Brown Rat did not evolve on subway tracks. Nevertheless, it still finds those rails a reliable place to settle down after a long day of pizza-nabbing. Each species relies on a unique combination of habitat factors to live, with some species more discerning than others. The Brown Rat, we might conclude, is not a picky creature. Some species of tropical montane hummingbirds, who only live on a few isolated mountaintops in Central America, are perhaps more choosy.

Habitat types differ in geology, climate (including temperature and precipitation), geographic location, water chemistry and soil properties. Different communities of plants and animals can also create different habitats; some species may rely on another species to survive. Some wasps only lay eggs in fig trees, some ants rely on Acacia trees to colonize and some people just, like, can’t live without their dogs. There is no fixed number of habitat types, only a lengthy list of factors to describe habitat. Each combination (cold, wet and mountainous; warm, dry and mountainous; temperate, marine and sea-level; etc.) is a unique habitat. If you add another factor to the list, the differentiation grows.

The species-habitat relationship is a major tenet of Rainforest Trust’s work to help protect the specific habitats endangered species rely on to survive. Take, for example, Rainforest Trust’s project with the Critically Endangered Palawan Forest Turtle. The entire species relies on lowland swamp forest habitat in one corner of the Philippines. Without this habitat in this location, the entire species will go extinct. If you want to protect gorillas, you need to understand where gorillas thrive. If you want to protect Leafcutter ants, you need to understand where Leafcutter ants thrive. Same goes for pythons, tuna, sugar maples and every other species on the planet.

The Palawan Forest Turtle. Photo courtesty of N. Cegalerba and J. Szwemberg.

As Jeff Goldblum said in my favorite movie: “Life, uh, finds a way.” While terse, Michael Crichton’s punchy take is a decent one-line description of the entire field of biology. Life is everywhere and, uh, finds a way. There are microbes that rely on the salty water of the Dead Sea and spiders that only live on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Anywhere on Earth, we should ask, “What lives here?” not, “Can anything live here?”

So why, dare I ask, did the Helmeted Guineafowl cross the road?

Guineafowl rely on habitat traits to survive, and we can assume that both sides of the road, being adjacent, contained the necessities of guineafowl life. The south side was managed for wildlife, ensuring food availability and nesting space, while the north side was not. On the south side of the road, the guineafowl would compete with other guineafowl for resources; on the north side of the road, the guineafowl might compete with domestic chickens. Due to differences in anthropogenic influence, the plant communities, insect communities and soil properties might be different on either side. Two places on Earth, the south side and the north side of one road, vary only in minutiae, but important minutiae.

But the guineafowl and I had different knowledge of the situation. I knew which side might be empirically better for the guineafowl. The guineafowl understood the situation on the ground. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in its immediate vicinity. Maybe another guineafowl scared it. Maybe a Bat-eared Fox was trying to eat it. Maybe it was venturing off to live somewhere new. Maybe it was training for the Guineafowl Olympics. The guineafowl didn’t know the other side held, statistically, fewer opportunities for success. The guineafowl only knew what it knew in that definitive moment and, unlike me, knows what happened in the seconds, hours, days, months and years afterwards.

Our hero must make a decision.

So why did the guineafowl cross the road? After putting the pieces together, we can determine that the scientific, definitive answer is: Who knows? As much as we try to understand the species-habitat relationship, we’ll never be able to predict everything. For conservation, we do the best we can to understand every detail of each side of the equation (species and habitat) and plan for what we know, hoping the wildlife go along with the plan. I don’t know why a guineafowl runs across a road, risking its life.

Maybe the guineafowl just wanted to get to the other side.

Rainforest Trust’s work to protect habitats for threatened species is grounded in cutting-edge conservation science. But in this series, we explore the basics of conservation science and how they inform Rainforest Trust’s scientists.

Here at Rainforest Trust, we use data – a lot of data – to conserve habitats for endangered species. We need to know where the species lives, how many of them there are and how best to conserve said species.

But that knowledge is always changing. Our Rainforest Trust scientists are constantly reflecting on the central question: How do we determine the most effective strategies for conservation when we can’t be certain of everything that might affect those strategies?

We use the power of collective knowledge to overcome uncertainty. A vague concept, I know. But let me explain. Take, for example, the case of the Congo’s elephants.

Somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an elephant. At the moment I write this piece, the elephant – the specific individual – might be sleeping. It might be eating, drinking, cavorting with another elephant or partaking in whatever other activity a wild elephant in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo might partake in.

I don’t know where, exactly, the elephant is at this precise moment or if any other elephants are nearby. I don’t know if the elephant is sick, well-fed, hungry, stressed or relaxed. I know nothing about this specific elephant. But I know an elephant is somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

African Forest Elephants. Photo by Caroline Granycome/Flickr

As a society, we know elephants are somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since we, as a species (humans), know an elephant exists somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I, as an individual, know an elephant exists somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And now I’ve told you. So now you know.

We can infer facts about the elephant based on general trends, but with less certainty. We know what it (probably) eats. We know how big it will (probably) become. We know how old it will (probably) grow to be. We know the individual is an African Forest Elephant, as opposed to an African Bush Elephant (although African Bush Elephants live in the DRC, too, we’ll assume I’m writing about an African Forest Elephant), but we aren’t sure if that distinction is between a species or a subspecies.

There are other tidbits of information we probably don’t know. We probably don’t know where this elephant was born. We probably don’t know what other elephants this elephant has encountered. We probably don’t know how far this elephant has travelled in the past two weeks. We may know these things, but we probably don’t.

Finally, there are some details we definitely don’t know. We don’t know if this elephant has a recurring itch on its left ear. We don’t know where this elephant will go tomorrow. We don’t know when or how this elephant will die.

Science is both fueled and limited by uncertainty. Science discovers the undiscovered, sees the unseen and recognizes the unrecognizable. But science requires certainty to move forward, state assumptions and take the next step. In conservation, science necessitates action and action necessitates science. But if we don’t know everything, how can we do anything useful? Uncertainty can be paralyzing, but paralysis is unacceptable because conservation inaction leads to extinction.

I couldn’t find any photographs of the Dodo. Because extinction is permanent.

And extinction is permanent.

As conservation grew – from a pastime to a field of study to an industry – the science and conversation around it only grew more and more complicated. This was good! The sharing of ideas, knowledge and inquiries, discussions at conferences, community meetings and camping trips, newly published papers, books and films, and policy, law, economics, biology, chemistry, geology, geography and fashion all add to the field of conservation. Every one of these methods is useful and inspiring, but not always global or continuous.

But these developments also meant that conservation science became more and more complicated. So as conservation grew – from a pastime to a field of study to an industry – fewer and fewer people were fully in the know.

We’re going to change that.

It’s completely understandable if you don’t understand the nuances of the science and policy of wildlife conservation. But I bet you know animals exist. You probably know some species are endangered and some species are not. You probably don’t know every step in the decision-making process, or who decides what is Endangered or Vulnerable or of Least Concern. You definitely don’t know how to save every species. But we need to find the solutions to protect every species on the planet. Not only pandas, lions and bees, but every moth, tree, fungus, protozoan, sea cucumber and anglerfish needs our help. Every. Single. Species.

And you (that’s right, you) play an important role in getting that done.

The conservation community can’t save the planet on our own. We don’t have the necessary time or capacity to protect every species of spider, let alone every species. So you have two options. You can take the route leading to a hilarious yet meaningful memoir the New York Times Book Review will call “surprisingly refreshing and heartfelt” and quit your job, move to Alaska and hand-rear orphaned caribou to release to the wild. If you think that’s your calling, by all means, please do so. But you don’t need to and I actually encourage you not to.

We need bankers, writers, factory workers, farmers, lawyers, politicians, air traffic control officers, grocery store clerks, retirees, students, actors, Olympic speed skaters, plumbers, recreational golfers, Yankees fans, Red Sox fans, people who don’t like baseball, people who’ve never heard of baseball, people who have heard of baseball but don’t feel one way or the other about baseball and everyone else to be aboard the Biodiversity Express. Stay where you are, keep doing what you’re doing and keep conservation in mind. By learning a little more about how conservation works, you might end up with a bigger appreciation of how important conservation is.

Look at all those potential conservationists!

I’m going to help you start doing that by unraveling some of the nitty-gritty. This series will explore how Rainforest Trust uses conservation science and everything it entails. We have big plans for conservation and want you all to understand exactly why our work is vital. I, on your behalf, will ask little questions to get to the bottom of the big questions: Who does the research? What information do we need to assess species status? Where does the Black-bellied Pangolin live? When did the Yangtze River Dolphin become functionally extinct? Why is the Giant Panda no longer listed as Endangered? Why should you care? How are we at Rainforest Trust using this information to protect our planet’s species?

Science is about uncertainty, but uncertainty does not consume science, nor does it immobilize it. (See Appendix I of the official IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria, titled “Uncertainty.”) We need not know every detail to save our planet. We only need to keep learning.

We need you to be an advocate for conservation. But that starts with a foundation of understanding. So let’s begin with the knowledge that somewhere in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is an elephant.