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Cotton-top tamarins are found only in the country of Colombia. That’s the only place on Earth
you’re going to find them. You know, the word for cotton-top tamarin in Spanish is mono titi cabeciblanca
little monkey with the white head, but that’s a mouthful to say, so most people just call them tities.
In 1973, cotton-top tamarins were listed as endangered, but after the results of our census
survey, where we found there were only 7,500 cotton-top tamarins left in the entire country
of Colombia, we were able to get them changed from endangered to critically endangered.
Many of the communities that live near the forest where the cotton-top resides live in
poverty. So they need to go into the forest each and every day to extract resources, and
these are the same resources that the tamarins need. It’s really important that we get
very accurate estimates of where all the forest is in Colombia that would be suitable for cotton-tops.
Anne was just uh, she’s so enthusiastic
and she was really interested in learning more about what remote sensing could do for their project.
The Colombia Ecological Forecasting project
began when one of my colleagues from Emory University approached me, and he thought we may be
able to help Dr. Anne Savage and her organization, called Proyecto Titi.
Scientists alone were not going to be able to save this species, so
I started Proyecto Titi, which is a non-profit organization that allows lots of people to
get involved. It’s not only scientific research, but it has very extensive community education
programs, and then also working with communities on developing sustainable alternatives to
reducing their impact on habitats.
They have an amazing field site in Colombia where they can conduct ground
data, but it’s such a huge area. We were able to bring NASA earth imagery to them and
help them look at a broader scale and assess this huge habitat.
And I jumped at the idea, because we were really looking for someone
who could help us come with some really up-to-date maps for forest cover in Colombia. There are
very few large expanses of forest in this region where cotton-tops are found. So one
of our goals has been to look at where are some of these smaller forest patches located,
and can we take those forest patches and sort of unite them together or do some reforestation
programs that will give us a large area that we can set aside under a conservation agreement
or a conservation easement.
I think it’s not uncommon for biologists and conservationists
to work at the ground level, and they’re used to being in one park and seeing it from
a ground perspective, but then to back up from space and look at how that park fits
in with all the surrounding area and land use, and then look at the country as a whole
is just a totally new perspective.
I was so excited to be able to work with the students, mainly because
they brought a level of expertise that we didn’t currently have on our team.
Like, you know, maybe a meter or even less than a meter and then we’d
really be able to look at the texture and stuff…
We sat together and we talked about what the deliverables would be at the
end of the project. And so for me that was really helpful, because I also was learning
some new skills. I don’t typically work with satellite data.
We created a classification map that displayed eight classes, including
suitable forest and then kind of non-suitable forest that could be used but isn’t their
prime habitat. Then we also looked at forest loss over time, so we created some time series
maps that displayed forest-change detection, so we highlighted areas that lost forest and then areas
that gained forest. And then we did kind of a connectivity and habitat modeling,
so we looked at forest connectivity using a landscape metric called edge density, which
looks at the shape and size of a forest patch and if it’s more ideal, because these tamarins
need really contiguous non-interrupted forest.
We could give her GPS coordinates and her team could check the areas we
were looking at, and make sure what we’re seeing is actually what’s there on the ground,
and that it’s great for cotton-tops.
We found out that the cotton-tops have been encroached upon by agriculture,
because it’s a heavy agriculture society there, and that they’ve been pushed to these
small patches throughout northwest Colombia. The amount of suitable forest left is about 5.7%
The maps that the teams have produced are remarkably valuable for us, one
because it gives us a great overview of the amount of forest habitat that’s available,
and we haven’t had that information before, and this is a very powerful image for the
public to see exactly where some of the hot spots are for cotton-top tamarins when it
comes to both forest destruction and areas of opportunity. These are places that we really
can protect in our lifetime to ensure the survival of this amazing animal. We’ll be
petitioning the Colombian government to establish these as protected areas.
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