Office of Public Affairs Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
The Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University will open Nov. 14 to pioneer new multidisciplinary approaches to species conservation.
The center, known as CERC, is a collaboration among five independent scientific institutions that draws on the expertise of more than 50 faculty, making it the largest such program of its kind anywhere in the world, according to its director, Don J. Melnick, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Columbia. Affiliated with Columbia are the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, the Wildlife Conservation Society and Wildlife Preservation Trust International.
CERC will hold an inaugural dinner Nov. 14 in its rooftop greenhouse atop Schermerhorn Hall on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus. President George Rupp will open the ceremony and Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, will deliver the keynote address.
The center, part of the new Columbia Earth Institute, has already hired nine new faculty and research scientists, instituted instructional programs in biodiversity conservation at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, and is undertaking an integrated assessment of the effects of climate change in Indonesia. Its program is made possible by a $6 million grant from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and $3 million in construction funds from Columbia.
"Beyond the facilities we are building is our mission to prepare the next generation of environmental leaders through education, training and research," Professor Melnick said. "Some of those leaders may be trained primarily in the physical or social sciences, but they will all have the tools of organismal biology."
An example of CERC's multidisciplinary orientation is a long-term project in Indonesia, where researchers are using El Niöo events, long spells of hot, dry weather, as a model for the potential consequences of permanent global warming for a host of variables, including agricultural output, economic growth and human disease. Elsewhere, CERC scientists are conducting research across such disciplines as conservation genetics, population biology, community ecology, environmental economics, plant systematics, animal systematics, environment and human disease, and ethnobiology and human ecology.
CERC has an unusually large number of researchers (11) and labs (six) that are using new molecular genetic techniques to help define and conserve endangered species. This approach involves extracting DNA from a number of individuals of a species, then comparing the material to determine the distribution of genetic variation within the species and how closely the species may be related to others. Professor Melnick's 1989 genetic studies of the black rhino found that several scattered populations were genetically close enough to interbreed, a finding that allowed conservationists to more effectively manage the threatened species. His more recent genetic work on the Sumatran rhino has been critical to the management of that species.
Biologists estimate that humans may cause the loss of as many as a half-million to a million species in the next 20 years, said Mary Pearl, executive director of Wildlife Preservation Trust and associate director of CERC. Researchers at CERC are involved in conservation efforts around the world, including work to save rhinos and chimpanzees in Africa; rhinos, elephants, orangutans, and monkeys in Asia; reptiles and amphibians in Madagascar; Galapagos tortoises, tropical palms and a host of other endangered species.
"It is in this context that we will expose students to the practice of biodiversity conservation, as well as the theory," Professor Melnick said.
CERC represents the return of organismal and evolutionary biology as a field of study at leading American universities, Professor Melnick said. Columbia led the field for decades, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and included among its faculty such luminaries as Thomas Hunt Morgan, the first to use fruit flies in genetic studies and the winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Hermann J. Muller, who won the Nobel in 1946 for the discovery that X-ray irradiation could produce genetic mutations; and Theodosius Dobzhansky, who showed that underlying evolutionary change was the process of genetic mutation and the spread of those mutations in populations.
In 1966, Columbia merged its botany and zoology departments into a biological sciences department, curtailing species-oriented studies to focus on molecular and cellular biology, as did other institutions. As conservationists have come to recognize how little they know about how species interact to form an ecosystem, organismal biology has made a comeback at American universities, Professor Melnick said. Species diversity is not an end in itself, but is the key to preserving ecosystems that provide important services, such as water purification, soil cover and protection from pests and diseases, he said.
Botanical, ecological, and agronomic research at CERC will take place at a new 4000-square-foot teaching and research greenhouse, the first of its kind in Manhattan in a quarter-century, atop Schermerhorn Hall. The greenhouse will serve as a hub from which small-scale studies can be transported to CERC-affiliated facilities at Black Rock Forest, a 3,700-acre temperate forest reserve 50 miles north of the city; the Biosphere 2 Center, a sealed environmental research station in Oracle, Ariz., that is managed by Columbia; and tropical research facilities in the Atlantic forest of Brazil and the wet forests of Indonesia.
This fall, the first eight undergraduates declared majors in ecology and environmental biology; they will conduct research in natural ecosystems in Brazil, Indonesia or other "high biodiversity" countries. Eleven graduate students enrolled in the new Ph.D. program in ecology and evolutionary biology, which has a strong biodiversity conservation orientation. CERC has also founded the Morningside Institute, a professional training center devoted to the needs of researchers and professionals in biodiversity conservation.
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