UH Manoa botanist Rainer Bussmann to participate in $1.78 million research and conservation grant

Grant will establish research center to study tropical montane forest ecosystems

HONOLULU — University of Hawaii at Manoa Associate Professor and Lyon Arboretum Scientific Director Rainer Bussmann will participate in a three-year, $1.78 million conservation grant awarded to Nature and Culture International (NCI) by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The grant will further research, strengthen park management and enforce park boundaries in three strategic Andean sites in Peru—Rio Abiseo National Park, Cordillera Colán Reserve Zone and Alto Mayo Protected Forest.

"The importance of these areas cannot be underestimated," said Bussmann. "Tropical forests constitute 7 percent of the planet‘s land surface, but are believed to hold over 50 percent of the world‘s variety of life. The Andean area alone contains nearly 10 percent of the world‘s plant species."

The research component of the grant calls for the establishment of research centers that will contribute to the understanding of the ecological processes in tropical montane forest ecosystems and provide excellent opportunities for field research by Peruvian and international students. NCI anticipates that solid conservation management will bolster ecological connectivity and viability along the corridor that runs the extent of Peru‘s northern Andes and Ecuador‘s Amazonian lowlands known as the Condor-Kutukú corridor.

Conservation of biodiversity is one of the key activities of the Andes-Amazon Initiative of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which provided the grant to NCI. Bussmann, who joined the UH Manoa faculty in 2003 and serves as both the vice president and scientific director for NCI, has established a strong international research program at Lyon Arboretum and played a strong role in the development of the Arboretum‘s publication program and tools for the management of ethnobiological data.

For more information about NCI, visit http://www.natureandculture.org. For more information on the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, visit http://www.moore.org.

About the University of Hawaii
Established in 1907 and fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the University of Hawaiʻi is the state‘s sole public system of higher education. The UH System provides an array of undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees and community programs on 10 campuses and through educational, training, and research centers across the state. UH enrolls more than 50,000 students from Hawaiʻi, the U.S. mainland, and around the world. For more information, visit http://www.hawaii.edu.

For more information, visit: http://www.moore.org