• How much is gold worth? by Scott Mori

View of the Mount Galbao showing the beauty of the forest surrounding Saül. © C. A. Gracie.

April 27, 2012. Dear ATBC members and councilors, As many of you will remember, ATBC added a conservation goal to its mission in 2004-5 and created a Conservation Committee (CC) consisting of 21 ATBC members.  This historical decision coupled with the dedication of the committee members lead to our society achieving great successes in the conservation arena. The first 8 years of the CC activities was also a grand learning experience for ATBC.  During this period we learned how to effectively coordinate resolutions, how to mobilize our membership to make meaningful and timely conservation statements, and confirmed that our annual meetings are an excellent forum for discussing conservation declarations.  We also learned how sensitive some of these conservation and related policy issues can be for many of our members, our local meeting hosts, councillors and officers.

Princeton University Press published Seeds of Amazonian Plants by Fernando Cornejo and John Janovec. The authors assembled some 750 full-color photos describing seeds, habit, trunk, bark, leaves, infructescence, and fruit which enables users to identify seeds of 544 genera and 131 families of plants. It also includes an unique seed identification key, is compact, portable, and beautifully illustrated. Certainly, the ideal field guide for tropical biologists.

Dr. Scott A. Mori, Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the New York Botanical Garden, ATBC member, wrote (text replicated here below) on 24th of December 2012 to the Prefet of Guyane about his concern after the French Minister Arnault Montebourg officially authorized the Mining Inc. REXMA to exploit gold in the vicinity of the village Saül, within the National Park of Guyane. He concludes :"I predict that there will be a universal protest against gold mining in this area because it is no longer secrete that gold mining destroys the environment everywhere it occurs, and because destroying the rights to clean water is an ecological crime." Scott Mori indeed has a long experience of the flora of Central French Guiana, and published several volumes on the diversity of the Guiana Shield. Lately, he wrote and edited the book Tropical Plant Collecting: From the Field to the Internet, that was inspired by decades spent in tropical rainforests, especially in the forest of Saül in French Guiana, his base since 1976. His opinion thus matters a lot. (Photo by Carol Gracie)

• Scott A. Mori and his Websites
• Fungal and Plant Diversity of Central French Guiana
• Parc Amazonien de Guyane
• Tropical Plant Collecting: From the Field to the Internet (Reviewed, Biotropica, 2012)
• Letter to the Prefet of Guyane, dated 24 December 2012

See also former ATBC resolutions about illegal goldmining activities in the Guiana Shield

• Resolution Seeking to Halt Rampant Invasions of Illegal Miners in the Rio Caura Basin, Venezuela (October 2006)
• Resolution in Support of Law Enforcement Against Illegal Goldmining in Nouragues Nature Reserve, French Guiana (July 2006)
• Resolution in Support of Halting Illegal Gold-mining Activities in Protected Areas of the Guianas and Northern Amazonia (March 2005)

Last year, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation met for the first time in Africa, in Arusha, Tanzania. This ATBC2011 event was very well attended by 438 participants coming from institutions based in 46 countries, a third of them from Africa (Source : Nobby Cordeiro). More works is needed to promote education and research in the continent. Tropicalbio reports here about the inititiative of the Trento Science Museum (Italy) and the University of Trento, in collaboration with Tanzania National Parks. They organize the second edition of the Summer School on Tropical Rainforest Biodiversity to be held in the Udzungwa Mountains National Park, Tanzania, during 26 August - 8 September 2012.

• Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre, a field station annexed to the Udzungwa Mountains National Park and managed by Trento Museum.

(© Udzungwa Summer School)