ATBC 2008 -

ATBC in the Guianas : Chair's personal sentiment

After the 3rd Symposium-Workshop on Frugivores and Seed Dispersal in Sao Pedro, Brazil, I (P.-M. Forget) originally wrote on 17 August 2000 an email to the President of ATB Kamaljit S. Bawa and to the executive Director John Kress proposing to organize an ATB meeting in French Guiana with the goal to foster attention on the Guiana Shield and the Amazon. The idea was to jointly meet with the (formely-German) Society for Tropical Ecology (GTOE) (this worked out !). Support from the scientific community and colleagues was strong enough to decide me to go ahead "contre vent et marée".

Later on, I have been invited by David Hammond (formerly at Iwokrama) to co-present a talk at a workshop on Wildlife Management in Georgetown, Guyana. I met there a number of scientists among them Paul Ouboter, Bart de Dijn, Kirsten Silvius, Joe Fragoso and Jose Ochoa, all working in the Guiana Shield but in different countries, Suriname, Guyana, Brazil, Guayana Venezuela, Guyane, all separated by rivers, true frontiers at that time, lacking a scientific network across the Guianas. Among them, Bart de Dijn, currently teaching at AdekUS, planted the seed in my mind. Focused on French Guiana for at least 16 years, and on Central America, I knew almost nothing of Suriname, across the frontier-river Maroni, just a couple of hundred kilometres from my study sites.

This was paradoxical given that I started my carrier reading the book by (Richards 1996), and studies by Schulz (1960) and van Roosmalen (1985a,b), my bedside references for many years. Time had come to move toward a new, different direction trying to foster on the Guianas, particularly Suriname. The ATBC 2008 meeting owes lot to Bart de Dijn. Since then, we have been willing to develop the network across the Guianas. But time is passing, even flies when you are a academic scientist with commitment to publish articles, lead research, advise students, attend conferences and give talks. The fruit was not yet ripe in late 2000. Seeds were not matured to be dispersed, and maturation took more time than expected.

2002 was a turning point in the history of the ATBC 2008 meeting.

In early 2002, I tried to organized a regional Workshop-Symposium in French Guiana, but failed to get financial support. The time I invested and thus ‘wasted’ in the preparation of this regional meeting proposal was finally useful when I had to work on the ATBC meeting proposal. For the first time in April 2002, I visited Paramaribo, Suriname, to attend the CI-IUCN workshop on protected areas in the Guiana Shield. There, more than one hundred (120) of scientists from North and South America, Europe, and the Carribean islands met. With Lim Burton, François Catzeflis, Mark Engstrom, and Scott Mori, we went to Brownsberg Natural Park (BNP) where I only spent a couple of days, enough to know I'd like to develop collaboration foward between French Guiana and Suriname. I have thus decided to return to Brownsberg to interact and collaborate with the Research Department of STINASU under the supervision of Bart de Dijn. There, I worked with students from Suriname, Holland and France. I also met other scientists from the USA (Norconk, Boinski).

The Guianan network was shaping up, but was limited to some personal interests. It needed to be more international across the Guiana Shield, and generalized abroad. On 6th July 2003 in Aberdeen, Scotland, the ATBC offered me that opportunity after the Council board had accepted the proposal of Annual Meeting in Suriname, in 2008.

During the ATBC 2004 meeting in Miami, 12-16 July, David Hammond and I organized a symposium on Forest Ecology and Conservation in the Guiana Shield, a important step toward the forthcoming ATBC meeting in Suriname. In late February 2006, with Hans ter Steege, we attended the bioguayana meeting in Venezuela. Again, we were only a limited number of non-Venezuelan scientists.

Brice Noonan since then took the welcomed initiative to start the bioguiana.org network, and we’ll officially launch the Regional Network during the ATBC meeting, i.e. nearly 8 years after David Hammond started the process in Guyana. The Flora of the Guiana also developed its own network. It is time to join these groups together in Suriname, in June 2008 at ATBC Annual meeting.

As a conclusion, this ATBC 2008 meeting successfully complements those different initiatives in 2000 (Iwokrama), 2002 (CI-IUCN), 2004 (ATBC meeting) and 2006 (Bioguayana symposium) to create a Regional Network in order to link scientists across the Guiana Shield. Now, we need to link and network with our African colleagues across the Atlantic Ocean, another barrier that can be easily crossed just as seeds do (e.g. Carapa guianensis - cf. Sea-bean -, one way or the other… Let's put together the splitted Gondwana parts.

The Carapa Dream Team : PM Forget, David Kenfack (Cameroun & MOBOT) and Mathieu Gueye (IFAN, Senegal) at AETFAT, Yaoundé, February 2007.

Pierre-Michel Forget

ATBC 2008 Chair,

August, 17, 2007

References cited

Richards, P. W. 1996. The tropical rain forest. Cambridge University Press, pp.

Schulz, J. P. 1960. Ecological studies on rain forest in northern Suriname. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Natuurkunde. 1-267.

van Roosmalen, M. G. M. 1985a. Fruits of the Guiana flora. Institute of systematic botany, Utrecht University, Wageningen. pp.

van Roosmalen, M. G. M. 1985b. Habitat preferences, diet, feeding strategy and social organization of the black spider monkey (Ateles paniscus Linnaeus 1758) in Surinam. Acta Amazonica (supplement) 15: 1-238.