Three scientists from Latin America won the award known as the “Green Oscar”, for saving endangered species.
They are Yara Barros from Brazil, Andrés Link from Colombia, and Federico Kacoliris from Argentina. They received the award, one of the most prestigious in conservation, on Tuesday in London.
Who are the winners of the Whitley Award, the Green Oscar
The Whitley Award, also known as the Green Oscar, is awarded annually by the British foundation of the same name to conservation leaders from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
In the case of the awardees, their work reflects a combination of several factors. On one hand, the passion for biodiversity, scientific innovation, and a central point: the conviction that lasting conservation solutions must include and empower local inhabitants.
Federico Kacoliris’s work, CONICET researcher
CONICET La Plata researcher Federico Kacoliris was one of the awardees.
The recognition was for his work in the protection, reproduction, and reintroduction of the Valcheta Frog (Pleurodema somuncurense). It is an amphibian endemic to the Valcheta Stream, located in the Somuncurá plateau, in northern Patagonia, near the border between Río Negro and Chubut.
It is among the critically endangered species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
In 2014, together with other professionals from CONICET and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of the National University of La Plata (FCNyM, UNLP), he built the first rescue center for the species.
It consists of a laboratory for reproductive studies that emulated the conditions of its natural habitat, where a year later they deposited a group of individuals that became a survival colony that gradually bore fruit.
WFN highlighted the positive impact on the environment and the “community approach” of the initiative.
Yara Barros’s work
Barros and her team protect jaguars in the Iguazú National Park, which has an area of over 180 thousand hectares on its Brazilian side.
Barros and her colleagues from the Jaguar Project of Iguazú (Projeto Onças do Iguaçu) seek to change the perceptions of local inhabitants about these felines.
Instead of hunting jaguars, local ranchers now engage with the project to find solutions to conflicts or cases of their animals being preyed upon.
Barros and her colleagues involve schools, institutions, and local inhabitants in their conservation mission. An example is the Crocheteras del Jaguar initiative, which empowers local women by generating alternative incomes.
Andrés Link and his primate project
Link and his colleagues lead the only study and conservation project in Colombia of the brown spider monkeys (Ateles hybridus), also known as choibos, which are critically endangered.
“For my undergraduate biology thesis work in 2000, I had the opportunity to live in a small field station in the Amazon rainforest and the little house where we lived was on a hill where brown spider monkeys passed by very frequently,” he told BBC Mundo.
He created the Primate Project Foundation and is also a professor at the University of Los Andes.
Due to deforestation for livestock or oil palm cultivation, the brown spider monkey is listed among the 25 most endangered primates in the world.
