{"id":14830,"date":"2024-05-07T08:02:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T12:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/?p=14830"},"modified":"2024-05-03T14:35:17","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T18:35:17","slug":"restoring-wildlife-habitats-in-southeast-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/2024\/05\/07\/restoring-wildlife-habitats-in-southeast-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"Restoring Wildlife Habitats in Southeast Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s not unusual for National Geographic Explorer Gretchen Coffman \u201991 to wake up to an orangutan eating flowers outside her window. \u201cIt\u2019s magical: the places I work, the people I meet,\u201d she says. Since 2020, she has lived in Singapore, her home hub for traveling to forests, coral reefs, and communities around Southeast Asia. Coffman grew up in the Southeastern United States, where she backpacked, kayaked, and developed a love for wilderness exploration that has shaped her life. Today, she is an ecologist, conservation scientist, and senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Geography. \u201cMy niche discipline of wildlife habitat restoration is interdisciplinary,\u201d explains Coffman, who works with wildlife biologists, hydrologists, engineers, landscape architects, and others. \u201cI weave this team-based approach into my teaching pedagogy of \u2018exploration and discovery.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coffman first experienced the wilderness of Southeast Asia after finishing her PhD, when she joined a team of wildlife biologists traveling to Laos. There, she discovered a critically endangered tree species in an area soon to be flooded by a hydroelectric dam. She secured a National Geographic Explorer grant to continue studying, protecting, and restoring that species.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Now, at her Tropical Restoration Ecology Lab at NUS, Coffman\u2019s team researches habitat restoration strategies and trains students and communities to monitor projects. She regularly leads students in field experiences across Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, and the island of Borneo \u2014 home to more than 15,000 species of plants and animals, many of which live nowhere else on Earth. Her team tackles habitat restoration where palm oil plantations, aquaculture, logging, and coastal developments have damaged ecosystems that plant, animal, and human communities need to thrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWorking on ecological restoration projects, I have often encountered challenges of small project sizes, short- term funding, and little monitoring of project success,\u201d Coffman says. \u201cOur team strives to scale up restoration efforts around Southeast Asia through engaging communities and youth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exploration is so important, Coffman believes, because \u201cpeople can\u2019t protect or love what they don\u2019t know.\u201d By inspiring her students, she hopes they\u2019ll join her in motivating others to help restore the wildlife diversity of the region. \u201cAt the same time, we\u2019re exploring diverse project funding sources and novel ways communities can turn restoration into businesses that provide sustainable livelihoods and scale up efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In June 2023, Coffman, 16 students, and 20 community organizations convened their first Community-Based Ecosystem Restoration Conference. \u201cSitting in an open-air pavilion,\u201d she recalls, \u201corangutans and proboscis monkeys around us, we shared knowledge about restoring tropical rainforests, coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests \u2014 ecosystems hundreds of millions of people depend on for food, storm protection, and jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her research team traveled again last December, visiting communities with a wide range of restoration experience. Turning restoration into a livelihood is a challenge those communities share, so Coffman\u2019s team helped train partner organization APE Malaysia to teach community members how to raise native tree species in family-owned nurseries so they can sell them back to conservation groups and help restoration efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coffman\u2019s team filmed as they traveled, using 360-degree cameras. Through immersive films like their award-winning Roots to Reefs 360<\/em>, \u201cwe\u2019re bringing wild Borneo to more people,\u201d she says. They show the films at festivals, to NUS students, and, with the aid of VR headsets, to community members. \u201cWe want to help people appreciate and better understand their surrounding ecosystems, so they\u2019ll be inspired to protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coffman recalls a student describing her as an eternal optimist. \u201cThe challenges to biodiversity loss are vast,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I truly believe everyone can make a meaningful difference.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside the wildlife restoration work of National Geographic Explorer Gretchen Coffman \u201991<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1272,"featured_media":14833,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[354,854,1763,425,2260,2259,106,861],"coauthors":[1231],"class_list":["post-14830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-discover","tag-alumni","tag-asia","tag-biodiversity","tag-ecology","tag-endangered-species","tag-national-geographic","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-3Rc","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/04\/IMG_0356.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14830"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15130,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830\/revisions\/15130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14830"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}