KIGALI -- When scientists, conservationists and policymakers from around the world gathered in East Africa this July (exchanging ideas, celebrating successes and planning for the future), the international group represented a living showcase of the dramatic transformations in tropical ecology research that has occurred over the last 60 years.
Founded in 1963 by a group of 32 men -- mostly white, mostly from the U.S. -- and just one woman, the Association for Tropical Biology focused primarily on advancing Neotropical botanical science.
A 2003 name change to the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation reflected the expansion of that mission to include tropical conservation. With 1,000 members in 70 nations today, the professional society's international membership represents an increasingly diverse roster of scientists from the Global North, tropical Latin America, Africa and Asia, with expertise in everything from carnivores to climate change.
The ATBC was born at the height of the Cold War, a time of intense global geopolitical upheaval. It was also an era in which the study of tropical ecology still heavily reflected the legacy of the 19-century colonial period, when jungle collections gathered by European and U.S. explorers attracted the interest of scientists who mostly viewed tropical organisms from afar, and as strange but worth learning about.
In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Caribbean colonies, and U.S. researchers began advocating for the closer study of tropical organisms in their natural habitats. This facilitated the establishment of important tropical research field stations during the early 20 century in Soledad, Cuba, and in Panama's U.S.-administered Canal Zone.
At these early field research stations, local people were present only as cooks and laborers, not as scientific collaborators or as students, a relationship that reflected the larger power imbalance between the Global North and its colonies.
The rise of anti-colonial movements in the mid-20 century upended that political and scientific order. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, U.S.-Cuba relations deteriorated, the Soledad research station was nationalized, and U.S. scientists left the country. A strong anti-colonial protest movement in Panama and elsewhere in the tropics raised serious concerns about access to field sites.
"The mood I get from the writings of those American tropical scientists is that they're panicking," says University of Texas at Austin historian Megan Raby, who studies the origins of tropical ecology. "They're struggling to find a new way to get to the places they want to work in, and a new way to frame what they're interested in doing."
In 1960, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida, a facility that had close ties to the now lost research station in Cuba, convened a meeting on tropical botany attended almost exclusively by U.S. participants. Recognition of the need to deepen connections with other tropical countries and embrace a more collaborative model led to a follow-up meeting in Trinidad in 1962. That session, besides U.S. participants, boasted significant representation from Latin America and the Caribbean.
"Even though they were in a minority, those Latin American scientists really pushed for things they were interested in," Raby says. "And their interest was not so much in establishing stations for foreign researchers as in circulating publications, having classes on applied questions, and really sharing resources."
This more diverse group formally established itself as the Association for Tropical Biology in 1963. Initial association meetings tended to focus on botany, with annual gatherings alternating between the U.S. and somewhere in the Neotropics. The organization then still reflected a heavy bias toward U.S. researchers and their networks. Among the founders there was only one woman, the esteemed U.S. botanist Mildred Mathias.
Over the next six decades, the organization's focus shifted, with the geographic diversity of members increasing, the tropical regions in which conferences were held widening, and the scientific topics on which members worked broadening. Women's representation also increased, while the emphasis on conservation deepened.
Major changes have taken place over the last two decades. This year's Kigali conference is only the organization's third in Africa, with the other two occurring in the last 15 years. Conferences in Asia have also increased, and the ATBC is now devoted to rotating meetings between tropical Asia, Africa and Latin America.
"The reason why we travel the world is because we want to bring people from nearby countries to participate," says Lucía Lohmann, ATBC's executive director since 2019, who originally hails from Brazil and now holds a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. This year's ATBC meeting included 400 attendees from 52 countries, with many from African nations.
The theme of the 60-anniversary conference was "Achieving Inclusive Science for Effective Conservation, Adaptation, and Resilience in the Tropics," reflecting a dramatic conceptual expansion from the 50-anniversary theme of "New Frontiers in Tropical Biology: The Next 50 years." In addition to a diverse menu of scientific talks, the ATBC conference held 13 workshops, with topics ranging from incorporating gender into research and practice, to scientific illustration and science communication, to emerging technologies like environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring.
Today's ATBC has signaled a commitment to making a positive lasting impact on local scientific capacity and infrastructure wherever it hosts its conferences, and achieves this goal partly by providing scholarships for local students. In Kigali this July, the ATBC made 61 scholarships available to Rwandan students to attend the meeting. Broadening the geographic and gender diversity of those receiving honorary fellowships also plays a big role in increasing the representativeness of the membership at large, according to Lohmann.
Another key local initiative carried out at annual meetings is the teaching of skills in tropical ecology via workshops and field courses. Before the Kigali conference, 20 Rwandan students attended a free course led by UC Berkeley ecologist Paul Fine, covering the basics of plant systematics and specimen preparation -- a course sited in the misty mountains of Rwanda's Nyungwe National Park, home to much of the country's imperiled biodiversity.
The local impacts of the ATBC's globetrotting conferences is quantifiable. For instance, after the association's 2019 conference in Antananarivo, Madagascar, a survey found that Malagasy researchers made up 34% of the total conference attendees, and 40% of them said that developing a professional network was the most consequential outcome of the meeting. As with other recent ATBC conferences, Kigali attendees will produce a declaration synthesizing the themes emerging from the event with current local conservation issues to raise awareness and spur action.
The ATBC continues focusing not only on basic science to understand how natural systems work, but also on applying that knowledge to tropical conservation. "When you bring conservation in -- because conservation is a crisis discipline that deals with imperfect and incomplete data sets -- there's a tension," says Colombian ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, now at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But I've seen that tension dissolve at ATBC over the years as basic science is being used to ask conservation questions that could never be asked before."
Local conservationists had a strong presence in Kigali, illustrating the benefits of applying a scientific approach to conservation. In one conference session, Rwandan scientist Deogratias Tuyisingize of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund reviewed efforts to census the endangered Grauer's swamp warbler (Bradypterus graueri), a bird endemic to high-altitude bogs in East Africa's Albertine Rift mountains. In another, Rwandan bird guide Joseph Lionceau explained approaches by the Rugezi Ornithology Center to restore native vegetation around a lake important to waterfowl.
Despite progress toward creating a strong science and conservation presence in tropical nations, there's still more to do, say Kigali participants. "We have a biodiversity hotspot here in Rwanda, but funding and training limit how we can explore it, and we have to wait for outsiders from overseas to come do research here," says Delphine Mpayimana, a Rwandan student who participated in the ATBC field course. While Mpayimana completed her master's degree at the University of Rwanda, she, like many other science students from tropical developing countries, is mainly looking abroad to advance her career as that is where funding for a Ph.D. or job is more attainable.
That unequal distribution of educational and employment opportunities means that tropical countries lose many of their best scientists to the Global North, which results in an ironic and inefficient situation where scientists need to be employed by institutions half a world away just to study their own countries. An important theme to emerge from the Kigali conference addresses this dilemma by fostering "South-South" collaborations.
"ATBC has done really well at building collaborations 'North-to-South,' but what we know from the Neotropics, the African tropics, and the Asian tropics is still not being cross-referenced throughout the tropical belt," says Ocampo-Peñuela. "Learning from researchers in the tropics for other parts of the tropics and building pan-tropical collaborations is something that would be really powerful." One way to achieve this goal, she suggests, would be for conservation funders to endow positions in tropical countries in order to retain talent or attract researchers from elsewhere in the tropics.
Advancing these priorities would benefit people everywhere, including in the Global North, because collaborations that boost scientists and research from tropical countries can positively impact the entire world. "We all depend on tropical ecosystems for our existence," says Lohmann. "If we don't have tropical forests, we'll feel the impact through climate change wherever we are."
Banner image: Participants in a workshop at the ATBC's 2024 conference in Kigali discuss issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in tropical field science. Image courtesy of the ATBC.
Rakotomanana, H., Razanamaro, O. H., Ravelomanana, A., Andriantsaralaza, S., Rafalinirina, A. H., Razanaparany, T. P., ... Goodman, S. M. (2023). ATBC 2019 in Madagascar: Its impact on the national scientific community. Biotropica, 56(1), 50-57. doi:10.1111/btp.13277