http://math240.lehman.cuny.edu:80/crater/
Conservation and traditional culture
go hand in hand in Crater Mountain.
The Crater Mountain Project is an effort in wildlife conservation that is based on offering collaborative research opportunities for scientists and others in the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area (CMWMA) of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Long-term goals of the project are to make Crater a distance learning site for students from the University of PNG, Goroka
campus, and to use satellite linking to enable the people of Crater to learn about the activities of other indigenous forest communities in PNG and of the world in general; the technology would allow Crater management groups to communicate directly with each other in the WMA and with fellow indigenous groups around the world. David Gillison, a Fellow of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Professor of Art at Lehman College, and Jamie James from the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation are planning to create a video-mail center for four villages that surround Crater. The model is still in its conceptual stages.Gillison became involved in the conservation project when he was studying the display behavior of certain species of birds of paradise in the area. During one of his visits conflicts with some of the villagers belonging to the village he was living in arose--as Gillison puts it, "I discovered that they were shooting my subjects." Gillison, the villagers and a group of conservationists interested in Crater then developed a raw outline of what is now the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area. The basic concept was to enable the landowners, in whose forests the researchers were working, to earn money without selling off large parts of their forests or killing their birds of paradise. The project that was meant to protect a small plot of forest (5/10 sq. km) and its birds, has now grown into one of the largest reserves in PNG. CMWMA , a reserve of primary rainforest surrounding a large relict volcano in the southern watershed of the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea, is approx. 3500 sq. km in size. WCS (then the New York Zoological Society) provided the funds for the creation of the Research and Conservation Foundation (RCF) of Papua New Guinea, and for beginning the work of gazetting the land owners of Crater, so that the area could legally be declared a reserve by the Government of PNG.
Gillison and Jamie James completed the planning grant for their initiative entitled 'Research as an Economic Enterprise' in 1993; US AID/WWF now funds the proposal through an organization called the Biodiversity Conservation Network. Arlyne Johnson, the scientific director of the Research and Conservation Foundation prepared the implementation stage of the proposal which is now being carried out under her direction.
A key element to 'Research as an economic enterprise' is to attract foreign research workers and Ph.D. candidates to the area and to give them the opportunity to employ local people as 'para biologists,' guides, porters and camp workers to help with their field work. The Wildlife Conservation Society (NY)and an NGO in Papua New Guinea are working on research training programs and infrastructure development to develop the research sites for national and overseas scientists, plus destinations for tourists.
Jamie James lived in the CMWA for two years and worked with landowners to develop consensus for the management of forest resources and habitats. His field work involved trekking from village to village in order to discuss issues related to resource use and potential community-based enterprise opportunities with indigenous landowner committees. As James points out, the exchange of information in Crater Mountain has proved to be a crucial factor in developing knowledge-based consensus. In order to make informed decisions, the communities need access to valid information, but substantive exchanges with distant communities are rare. The use of technology in the Crater Mountain project seeks to address this problem.
Apart from promoting crater to the world at large through the Crater Mountain Home Page, and digital video links into and out of Crater, David Gillison is also working on ways to create virtual 3D animations of birds of paradise. He is collaborating with Professor Robert Schneider of the Lehman College Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and Dr. Alejandro Grajal, WCS's Director of their Programma America Latina, to create the animations. They are using an SGI Indigo Extreme linked to a Power Mac to output three dimensional images; once the birds of paradise have been assembled in virtual form, they will be animated through the use of video tape shot both by research workers in the field, and of captive birds at the Bronx Zoo. The goal is to create a CD-ROM of the 3D-birds and to present them as VRML images on the web as a research and training tool for research workers. The collaborators hope that at some point they will be able to offer animated field guides to the birds of Crater and elsewhere for school programs in science and conservation.
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Photo Credit: "Flutes," David Gillison
© Hyperactive Co. 1996