Speaker: John Terborgh
(Note: we had major problems with this recording. There is audio all the way through, but the video only starts at around the 12m 50s mark. Apologies to all.)
Abstract
Elephants are regarded as “ecological engineers” for their capacity to transform habitats, as is well documented for savanna and woodland habitats, where they can safely be observed. Direct observations have not been possible as yet in closed evergreen forests, so little is known about elephant impacts in this environment. My wife, Lisa, and I, along with many collaborators, have been studying elephant impacts in equatorial evergreen forests for a decade, using both indirect and direct methods. We show that elephants, augmented by other megafauna, decisively influence forest structure, composition and diversity. Selective reduction of preferred forage species suppresses species diversity without driving local extinctions. When a forest loses its elephants, its tree species diversity increases sharply in what we term “diversity release.” Unlike the impacts of most human-mediated disturbances to tropical forests, effects of the natural disturbances generated by megafauna appear to be fully reversible.
Brief Bio
John Terborgh is James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science Emeritus in Duke University (USA) and has current affiliations with the University of Florida and James Cook University. His work focuses on tropical ecology, particularly plant-animal interactions and trophic cascades. He has published more than 350 articles and 8 books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He won Pew and MacArthur Fellowships in 1992, and in 1996 received the Daniel Geraud Elliot Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the boards of numerous conservation organizations and in 1999 he founded ParksWatch, an organization dedicated to monitoring and publicizing the status of parks in developing countries. He remains active in research and conservation to the present.
