As the effects of the global pandemic are felt keenly by everyone in their own homes and communities, it may seem as though the movements, population dynamics, and pathogen loads of animals in faraway tropical forests are a trivial matter. In reality, however, it is at times like these that the importance of this type of research becomes most salient.

The Importance of Wildlife Disease Screening

For more than a decade, FPI has been monitoring the disease status (including viruses) carried by our long-term study populations. The scientific community has strong reason to believe that COVID-19 was created by the accidental transmission of a virus from a reservoir species to a novel species (humans), and this type of spillover event is only expected to increase with human pressures on wildlife. Sadly, due to the global pandemic and travel restrictions, 2020 has left a problematic gap in our biosurveillance data. While this cannot be recovered, it becomes paramount that we are prepared for a greatly expanded 2021 field season. This will entail a larger team, wider sampling among various taxa, and screening for more pathogens than ever before. 

Taking Action
In 2020, FPI launched the In Situ Labs initiative, in conjunction with our forward-thinking partners. Our mission is to grow this initiative globally as a model focusing on wildlife health monitoring, ecotoxicology, and biodiversity censusing. In addition, this initiative will vastly increase the scale of both development and deployment for a wide variety of conservation technologies (ranging from species-specific GPS collars to remote sensing networks), which will enable this work to proceed safely and efficiently with exponentially more data collected.

FPI’s interest also lies beyond the important goal expanding research efforts. We are also boosting the size of our training programs, while taking measures to make them more accessible to all. It is only the combination and research and education that can truly make a difference to the future of conservation and local communities everywhere.

Your help –even if it is a small donation or simply sharing our posts on social media– means a lot to us, and can be instrumental in allowing this work to move forward at a critical time. We can’t do this without you. 

Sincerely, 

The Field Projects International Team.

This fund will be used solely to create scholarships for future black scientists, naturalists, and conservationists. Black people are woefully underrepresented in the sciences in general, and this needs to change. FPI is committed to addressing not only practical barriers to enrollment in our field courses and research training programs –such as the monetary cost of participating– but also addressing social and psychological barriers as well. This means making a concerted effort to recruit people of color into our programs, making sure our messaging is inclusive, and ensuring that the field environment is safe and welcoming. We believe that without more black voices in scientific fields and black contributions to research and conservation, our community is incomplete and the world at large is a much poorer place. 

Giving today will support the following programs:

Scientific Research: 2021 will mark the 12th field season for wildlife research at Los Amigos in Peru. Until COVID-19, we had never missed a field season since we first began studying wildlife in 2009. While our hope is still to collect some baseline data in collaboration with our Peruvian partners, we also must begin planning an expanded and more intensive 2021 field season. With your support, the immense hit to our research and budgets can be mitigated, and we can enhance our biosurveillance and wildlife monitoring efforts.

Wildlife Disease Testing: We have 8 years of disease monitoring data on primates, and two more on birds, bats and small mammals from the Los Amigos Biological Station. Our goal is not only to continue disease screening, but increase the scope of our efforts. We want to to test for more pathogens, to focus on more species, and to bring more aspiring young scientists into the field to help with collecting this data.  

 Conservation Technology: Our plans are to “Tech the Rainforest” by installing a low-cost, energy saving, canopy-based network that would listen continuously for any signals from sensors in the forest below. Initial investments have made it possible to develop and test these systems, but we will need more resources to set up the network in the rainforest and deploy custom GPS collars on focal primate groups.