News/events type: Nature series seminar

Abstract

The Lerma Wetlands in the highlands of Central Mexico have been home to Otomian peoples for at least ten thousand years. In their belief system, the rich biodiversity in the sweet water wetlands and the valley was the fruit of the generosity of Creation Mother, the Tlanchana, who would show in her favorite springs, at the feet of the Sierra Mountains that separate the Toluca Valley from the valley of Mexico to the east. When in the 1940s hundreds of springs were destroyed with dynamite as per instructions of an international water consultant, the Tlanchana abandoned her people and the waters were swallowed into the aquifer, with fish and all: the 20,000 ha wetland shrank to a few scattered ponds.

What Mindahi and his wife Geraldine bring is his biographic accounting of what has happened in the time of his grandfather, his father, himself, and their children, at a time when Tlanchana seems to be announcing her return. Will they be ready to receive her?

Bios
Mindahi Bastida Muñoz was born in San Pedro Tultepec, an island in the Lerma Wetland in Mexico State. He has a PhD in Rural Development and is member of the Otomi National Council of Mexico. He served for eight years as head of the Sustainable Development Division of the Intercultural University of Mexico State, and has promoted the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determine the future of their ecoregions for decades. He is a traditional ceremonialist and member of the Grand Council of the Eagle and Condor, also known as Earth Elders. He is the main author of the renowned book Ancestors, and is the co-producer of an online educational curriculum on the subject. He is also a proud contributor of Rooted in Ethics. Honoring life through a biocultural rights-based approach to care for trees and communities. He continues to support his community to protect the Wetlands and carries out yearly ceremonies in reverence to the Mother of the Waters.

Geraldine Patrick Encina is fourth generation Scottish, and she acknowledges both her Celtic and Mapuche ancestors. She is an Ethnoecologist and a Mesoamerican Cultural Astronomer, who has specialized on ancestral conceptions of time-space. She has recovered the original Otomi, Maya and Mexica-Aztec calendar systems and is currently working on a book to shift the paradigm of Mesoamerican conceptions of time-space. (Her scientific breakthrough implies changing every single Olmec, Maya, Toltec, Otomi and Aztec historical record that has been published in the last century). Her work sheds new light not only about the way that ancient civilizations conceived their place in the world, but also of why their inheritors today are so resilient and stubbornly connected to Mother Nature and lifecycles. She is author of Wetland Ecology and Culture in Almoloya del Río, and was a professor of Ethnoecology at the Intercultural University of Mexico State while raising her two children. She is currently an Indigenous Relations Advisor for One Earth, and is supporting the community members of the Lerma Wetlands to defend their rights as a socioecological unit.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.

The plant functional trait diversity research programme has expanded dramatically in the past two decades, as a result of the combination of a long-standing interest in fundamental syndromes of adaptive specialization behind the vast variety of form and function observed in nature on the one hand, and the pressing need to inform biodiversity policy in the face of rapid environmental change, on the other. Its first stages, focused on interspecific variability of traits assumed essential for plant growth, survival and reproduction, led to an unprecedented degree of collaboration in tools and communal data, and resulted in important stylized facts. From there, different paths branched out towards intraspecific variability, genomics, demography, biogeography, cascading into other trophic levels, and social perception and values.

The paths have achieved different degrees of progress, with some opening up whole new fields of inquiry and some others at risk of becoming blind alleys. A common denominator, however, is the need to recover the idea of integrated phenotype, as a keystone concept in the interface between functional ecology, evolutionary biology and ecosystem science.

Biography
Sandra Díaz is a Senior Principal Investigator of the Argentine National Research Council, a Professor of Ecology at Córdoba National University (Argentina), and a Visiting Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University (United Kingdom). She is interested in plant functional traits and syndromes, their effects on ecosystem properties, their contributions to human quality of life, and their interactions with global change drivers.

She constructed the first global quantitative picture of essential functional diversity of vascular plants –the global spectrum of plant form and function. She has advanced theory and practical implementation of the concept of functional diversity and its effects on ecosystem properties and benefits to people. She combines her ecology studies with interdisciplinary work on how different societies value and reconfigure nature, having spearheaded transformative conceptual frameworks favouring pluralistic collaborations in environmental knowledge and action, including the influential notion of nature’s contributions to people. She co-founded the Global Communal Plant Trait Initiative TRY.

She co-chaired the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and played a major role in the expert scientific advice to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. She is a Foreign Fellow of the British Royal Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society and a member of the Academies of Sciences of Argentina, USA, France, Norway, Latin America and the Developing World, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received several international scientific awards, including the Margalef Prize in Ecology (2017), the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Ecology and Conservation Award (2021), and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Medal (2022).

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.

Abstract:

Secondary forests are the predominant type of forest cover across the tropics. They provide myriad services and natural products to human populations worldwide and key habitat for countless forest-dwelling species. Although some fragmentation-related extinctions can be averted by forest regeneration, the role of second growth in biodiversity conservation remains controversial. Central to the debate is the capacity of secondary forests to preserve old-growth specialist species and to buffer the impacts of fragmentation on assemblages living in forest remnants. The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) is one of the world’s largest and longest-running experimental investigations. Spanning an area of ∼1000 km2 in the Central Brazilian Amazon, the BDFFP was initially designed to assess how fragment size influences biodiversity and ecological processes within rainforests. However, it has transcended its initial objectives, offering a wealth of insights into the long-term ecological dynamics of fragmented landscapes and their intricate relationship with forest regeneration. This talk will provide an overview of the research conducted over the last decades at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), examining with particular detail the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic responses of bats, one of the richest Amazonian mammalian groups, to forest regeneration. I will explore area, edge, and matrix effects and investigate time-related complexities related to both short- and long-term responses to changes in matrix structure and composition. Finally, taking the BDFFP as an illustrative example, we will discuss the conservation implications of these findings for tropical biodiversity and propose avenues for future research in temporal ecology.

Biography:

Ricardo Rocha is a conservation biologist from Portugal, with a specialization in tropical forests and island ecosystems. His research is aimed at providing the evidence required to support conservation decision-making in the face of contemporary global change. Ricardo’s particular focus lies in identifying ways to restore biodiversity in the aftermath of habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as managing human-modified landscapes to retain biodiversity and maximize ecosystem services. During his Ph.D., Ricardo spent over two and a half years studying bat communities at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project in the Central Amazon region of Brazil. He then joined the Conservation Science Group of the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the Conservation Evidence project. Simultaneously, he served as a scientific adviser for Lonely Planet, contributing to non-fiction wildlife books for children. For his second postdoctoral research position, Ricardo investigated the role of bats as suppressors of agricultural insect pests and human disease vectors in Macaronesia, West Africa and Madagascar. Rocha received the European Early Career Conservation Award from the SCB Europe Section in 2020 became a National Geographic Explorer in the same year. Ricardo is currently an Associate Professor in Conservation Science at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College.

Hugh in semi-retirement has 3 jobs: Biodiversity Council’s Co-chief Councillor, Chief Scientist of Accounting for Nature and The University of Queensland. He was the founding Director of The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, the National Environmental Science Program Threatened Species hub and an Australian Research Council Professorial, Laureate and Federation Fellow.

Hugh also has a variety of broader public roles advising policy makers and managers, and sits on c30 boards and advisory committees – from the Friends of Oxley Creek Common to Conservation International.

Alongside Dr Barry Traill, Hugh wrote “The Brigalow Declaration”. This open letter was used by the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie to stop land clearing in the state, thereby stopping c10% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per annum and saving an area the size of Portugal from conversion into farmland.

The Possingham lab developed Marxan, the most widely used conservation planning software in the world. Marxan was used to underpin the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef and is currently employed by more than 7000 users in over 180 countries to build most of the world’s marine and terrestrial protected area systems from the Amazon and British Columbia to the Sunda Sea and South Africa.

Hugh has co-authored over 740 peer-reviewed papers, including 35 in Science and Nature, and has been the privileged mentor of over 200 PhD candidates, honours students and postdoctoral researchers. His google scholar h-index is 164. Hugh has honorary doctorates from the University of British Columbia and Adelaide University.

He has one known psychological disorder – a compulsive desire to watch birds.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.

Sue is a photojournalist and Patrick is a writer. They have been documenting environmental and social issues in Brazil since 1985, with a focus on indigenous issues.

It all started one day in the 1980s when Sue met Cacique Raoni Metuktire and her life changed; he anchored her soul to the forest. Since then Sue and Patrick have produced many features for magazines and books, based on frequent visits, mostly to the Xingu River basin.

The Kayapo warriors, men and women, and all of the 18 different Indigenous peoples of the Xingu taught them so much about the forest and how to live. For them it was a re-birth. Witnessing the rapacious destruction they felt they had to do something!

They became more and more involved – and invested – in the Amazon and the people who live there. They gained a greater understanding of the social and environmental importance of the forest and neighbouring cerrado, for Brazil and the rest of the World.

In 2007 they spent six months travelling through the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, navigating the 2,500 kms of the Xingu River. They listened to their indigenous hosts as they told of their struggles and hopes. They shared dreams, they made lifelong friends. Each of the 48 villages they visited asked them to take their message to the world, to tell the kuben (non-indigenous people) about the strong indigenous cultures and the threats they are facing, from farmers, from illegal fires, from mining and from climate change.

That voyage is documented in their award-winning book “Spirit of the Amazon”. This illustrated talk brings that message from the heart of Brasil to Oxford!

“Our incredible friends from Xingu fed us, body and soul,” said Sue. “They showed us that they are one entity with the forest, the river, the rocks and the sky. They want non-Indigenous people to understand that Indigenous people are people, women and men, with aspirations and dreams. They are proud to fight with hope for a better future for their children and grandchildren, in fact for all of us wherever we are.”

Through their charity Tribes Alive they have been supporting Indigenous Peoples who are adapting to change. As their understanding of non-indigenous cultures has grown they have become bridges of knowledge. For Sue and Patrick they are very much part of their daily lives. When Cacique Raoni Metuktire comes to the UK he always insist on staying with Sue and Patrick because he is at home in their house, especially in their suburban garden!

Now more than ever it is important to give prominence to these resilient original peoples of the Amazon, to the indigenous guardians who protect and defend the forest in Brazil, who elevate the spirit of Amazon for the benefit of humanity!

Our book Spirit of the Amazon

French edition

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.