First-round winners

Eduardo Santana and Enrique Jardel

People in the equation

Biodiversity Award winners Eduardo Santana Castellon and Enrique Jardel Pelaez conduct their work in unique classrooms. One is indoors, at a unit of the University of Guadalajara in the small town of Autlán de Navarro, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The other is a few miles from the campus, in a unique biological reserve that covers some 130,000 hectares (500 square miles) in Jalisco and the neighboring state of Colima.

The Sierra de Manantlán reserve, as it is known, rises from 400 meters to 2,960 meters (1,300 feet to 9,700 feet) above sea level. It owes its reputation as a biological treasure house to the fact that two major geographic realms meet each other there, in what is called the Nearctic-Neotropical transition zone. The Sierra de Manantlán thus houses many species from the temperate north that live at the southern tip of their zone, along with many tropical species at the extreme of their northern habitat.

The result is a degree of species richness that is seen in few other places. The eight distinct types of forest found in the reserve contain more than 2,740 varieties of vascular plants (including many orchids); 295 species of birds; 45 species of reptiles; 20 species of amphibians; 16 species of fishes, and 76 species of mammals. At the small field station near the top of the reserve, 17 species of hummingbirds have been identified.

The many mammals in Sierra de Manantlán include white-tailed deer, otter, collared peccary, and all six of Mexico's wild cats (jaguar, puma, margay, jaguarundi, ocelot, and bobcat), though the larger ones are rarely sighted these days.

A very important mammal. There is another important mammal: Homo sapiens. The higher altitudes of the reserve are definitely the habitat of hummingbirds, deer, and plant life, but the valleys below are unmistakably in the hands of humans — some 5,000 to 7,000 of them within the bounds of the reserve itself.

These include small farmers and residents of indigenous communities. The organization which Jardel and Santana operate, the Manantlán Institute of Ecology and Conservation Biology (IMECBIO, in Spanish), estimates that 33,000 people live in agricultural communities that have rights over some of the reserve land. An estimated 400,000 people in the surrounding lowlands depend on the reserve (whether consciously or not) for the water that comes down the mountainsides.

These communities use the Sierra de Manantlán in many ways. The valley floors are carpeted with intensified sugar cane production; higher up, farmers graze their cattle, cultivate maize and other crops, and gather wood for fuel.

It is because of this conjunction of humans and the natural world that the Sierra de Manantlán has been awarded special designation by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a Biosphere Reserve. This reserve, like others throughout the world, is a place where scientists can collect basic environmental data and measure them against the influences of the world outside.

A distinguished relative. There's another reason why the Sierra de Manantlán is so special: a homely, skinny plant named Zea diploperennis, a wild relative of the one that is known throughout the world as maize and in the United States as corn, one of the most important food crops in existence. Zea diploperennis, which offers several important possibilities for breeding with cultivated maize, was long believed to be extinct. It was rediscovered in the Sierra de Manantlán in the late 1970s through a combination of scientific scholarship and graduate-student perseverance.

The discovery focussed national and international attention on the Sierra de Manantlán, whose slopes and valleys had once been forested but then were logged heavily. The state of Jalisco bought the land where Zea diploperennis grew (and still grows), and the University of Guadalajara opened a research station there. Once scientists began looking closely at the area’s flora and fauna, its unusual biological richness became apparent. As Eduardo Santana puts it: “It went from a one-species project to an ecosystem project.”

Jardel and Santana are fully aware that whatever happens to the diversity of Sierra de Manantlán will not happen in a vacuum — that people are part of any equation there, as elsewhere on the globe. These scientists call their effort “an ecosystem project with a social component.” They are using their Award to continue their efforts to design programs to protect the reserve’s biodiversity, while incorporating the human element.

A truly multidisciplinary effort. One way they hope to do this is by establishing truly multidisciplinary scientific projects in the reserve. The cumulative efforts of a mixture of disciplines have long been prescribed for coping with complex environmental problems, but the prevailing structures and strictures of science and academia have often worked against an effective collaboration of, say, entomologists, foresters, ethnobotanists, water and soil experts, sociologists, and anthropologists. Jardel and Santana are trying to overcome the traditional restraints of science while at the same time managing the tricky interactions of a growing human population and diminishing natural resources.

“Ultimately,” says Eduardo Santana, “most of the biodiversity in the world, or a lot of it, is going to be on managed lands — disturbed lands, secondary forests, where people are. So what we have here is just a little experiment in how we should be managing natural resources and doing productive activities in an area where there are people.”

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