American Scientist

As a biologist who spends a good part of his professional life describing new species from sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve always been struck by how few African scientists have participated in the formal process of discovering and describing new species. For living in such a well-recognized center of biodiversity, it is surprising that so few scientists in Cameroon, where I’ve done fieldwork for a decade, and neighboring countries have been involved in the process of describing new species. Many scientists from Latin America and Asia have been deeply involved in discovering and describing species from their countries, but this remains uncommon across most of Africa (the main exception being South Africa). For many African countries and for many groups of organisms, the majority of species diversity is described solely by scientists from other countries.

While I’ve had several Cameroonians involved in my work, it was not until teaching a biodiversity course in Cameroon over the past few weeks that I fully appreciated how rare this participation is. Of the just over 200 amphibian species in Cameroon, nearly all of which are frogs, scientists who are citizens of the country have been involved in the formal description of only six of them. And those are all within the past five years. Further, only two Cameroonians have been involved in that work, one a collaborator in Yaoundé, Dr. Nono Gonwouo, and the other a Master’s student working with me in San Francisco, Marcel Talla Kouete. The case is even worse for reptiles, with about 280 species, and the description of only one of these involved a Cameroonian (again Marcel). My ornithologist colleagues from the United States that are involved in my course have longed to come to Cameroon for decades because of its rich bird diversity. But, as far as I can tell, a Cameroonian scientist has never been involved in the description of a new bird species here. As an international community of scientists, we should be building in-country capacity for discovery and analysis to promote ownership and respect for local biodiversity and investment in sustaining rich ecosystems over the long-term.

I first traveled to Cameroon as a third-year PhD student, having never done fieldwork on my own. That trip was a trial-by-fire experience as I learned the ropes of exploration: getting to hard-to-get-to places, navigating village politics, and scrambling to pay guides after waking up and learning that overnight a rodent had eaten a few hundred dollars of cash. Ten years later, I’m not here for field research, at least not primarily. Instead, I’m here because Town Peterson, a professor at the University of Kansas, invited me to co-teach a course in the Biodiversity Informatics Training Curriculum (BITC), a project funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. I jumped at this unique opportunity distill my experiences from working in both the field and the lab over the past decade into a series of lectures for students and scientists coming from countries that haven’t been actively involved in many parts of the scientific process.

Courses like this one are a chance to reverse the trend of so few African participants in the discovery of biodiversity. During these courses, we teach new skills and guide students and colleagues to freely available and online resources for working in this field. Over the past few years, the BITC has held courses in Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Uganda. These courses focused on enabling African colleagues within the broad field of biodiversity informatics; you can check out lectures from these courses on the project’s YouTube channel. These courses include everything from building scientific institutions to modeling species’ distributions.

This course in Cameroon focuses on how we go out into the field and fully characterize the diversity of animal and plant species that we find. Students are learning not only how we search for species but also how we collect data and the methods for estimating when an inventory of a place (be it a national park or your backyard) might be complete. The participants in the course are about a dozen students and young scientists from across Africa with about half coming from Cameroon and the rest from Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia. In addition to Town and myself, course instructors include Mark Robbins and Rafe Brown (both from the University of Kansas), Moses Sainge of the Tropical Plant Exploration Group (TroPEG) in Cameroon, and guest lectures from two other Cameroonian scientists, Dr. Eric Fokam and Dr. Peguy Tchouto.

On the last day of February, I arrived in the steamy airport of Douala in Cameroon on my fifth trip to the country over the past ten years. As someone who studies life’s diversity and evolution, it’s always exciting to land in this hotspot of biodiversity. But unlike previous trips, I didn’t prepare to head out immediately to the forests or mountains to search for frogs (my taxonomic poison of choice). Instead, for months I’ve been looking forward to this particular trip because I was to spend the week sitting indoors helping to teach this course about the “how-to’s” of searching for and describing new species of plants and animals.

The most fun part is when we take all of the students to work for a week in the lowland forests of Korup National Park. During the week, we will conduct intensive inventories of plants, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. This will be an opportunity to put all that they’ve learned in the last week into action. We will be practicing field methods, including how to most fully document what we find with photographs, audio recordings, GPS data, and more. For some of those coming from other African countries, this will be their first opportunity to see a different assembly of plant and animal species from another part of the continent. After all, we didn’t really come to Cameroon to just sit inside!

Stay tuned for another post about our adventures in the classroom and field.