A New Partnership: Smithsonian Institution's Gabon Biodiversity Program and CABAlliance

By Anna V. Smith

The Central African Biodiversity Alliance is the most recent collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s Gabon Biodiversity Program. The CABAlliance is a combination of students, Postdoctoral researchers, policy makers, and scientists from Gabon, the United States, Europe, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon intended to promote research collaboration within Central Africa and to better understand species adaptability to climate change.

The initiative for the CABAlliance was first sparked from a conference that took place in May 2011 at the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku in Franceville, Gabon, which brought together U.S., African, European, and Japanese scientists to discuss biological diversity in the Congo basin, as well as the relationship between evolutionary research and conservation. While the program focuses on conservation prioritization, there is also a strong emphasis on partnership, and connecting African and U.S. students involved with the research.

“People were already working in the region and wanted to collaborate on conservation of biodiversity, and that produced this global collaborative program instead of working individually,” says co-principal investigator Dr. Nicola Anthony of the University of New Orleans.

The program is set up into different stages of research and progression, “We were talking about a way that we could make this project comprehensible to a large audience,” says Dr. Anthony. “So we collectively decided to break it down into parts that people can understand, because it is very multidisciplinary.”

A student assists Dr. Nicola Anthony in measuring the ear of a Stella wood mouse.

From May to August 2013, Dr. Anthony and a team of 11 have travelled around Gabon, working in the field to gather samples of Stella wood mice, African puddle frogs, and blue duiker dung for the project. Overall the CABAlliance will be studying nine different taxa, chosen for their widespread distribution and variety of habitats.

During their weeklong stay in the Gamba area during the month of July, the Smithsonian Institution lent their field research camp in Mouloundo to the team. The Smithsonian Institution is currently studying the area as the site of a road that will be built in the next two years.

In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution’s Gabon Biodiversity Program will be hosting the field-research aspect for the undergraduate training program. “Field visits to Gamba will expose students to how the private sector, government, and NGOs can work together to promote and protect biodiversity in the context of resource development,” says Dr. Lisa Korte, Director of the Gabon Biodiversity Program.  “Students will gain an appreciation for Gabon’s national parks as well as the beauty of the coastal forests, where the rainforest meets the sea and hippos, elephants, and buffalo walk the beach.”

Part of the team at the Mouloundo camp before going into the field.

Katy Morgan, from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, is one of the Postdoctoral researchers involved with Dr. Anthony’s team. “I’ll be doing the genomic analysis and sequencing to look for certain markers that are associated with different environments, to look for signals of adaptive evolution,” Morgan says. “We’re looking at identifying signals of adaptive potential to model how species will be able to respond to future climate change and to identify areas that will be important for conserving evolutionary potential.” Morgan will be working with the Stella wood mouse and duiker samples at the University of New Orleans after the team returns from Gabon.

In addition to exploring the genetic potential of adaptation, the CABAlliance will be prioritizing hot spot areas in Central Africa. The ranking will take into account the data from their study, as well as informed criteria such as human population density, cultural and social value, and opportunity costs of preserving the land instead of leaving it open to logging or mining.

“Papers will be published to relay the findings, but that is not going to be our main goal,” says senior scientist Dr. Eric Fokam from the University of Buea in Cameroon. Dr. Fokam works with the amphibian team to conduct plasticity studies, which will examine how much an organism evolves to better cope with environmental changes due to climate change. “The question is going to be, at the end of five years, how has this work contributed in making the lives of communities better in guaranteeing that several plant and animal taxa will have a better chance of surviving the activities of humans.”