The winners' efforts include tracking the evolutionary history of animals in China such as pandas and monkeys; lobbying successfully for a new national park in Peru; studying lemur populations in Madagascar; organizing a cooperative among indigenous people in a biodiversity hotspot in Ecuador, and operating a respected clearinghouse for biodiversity advocacy and information.
The five awards go to six people whose projects are in China, Ecuador, Madagascar, Peru, and the United States. The awards are for US$180,000 each over a three-year period. Altogether, the Foundations have honored 13 recipients with awards totaling $2,340,000 since the program started in 1996.
The Leadership Award winners do not apply for the awards; they are nominated and chosen by a panel of eminent scientists. The awards carry no obligation on the part of the winners, but all have said they will use the award money to continue their work to save biodiversity.
The Bay and Paul Biodiversity Leadership Awards are among the world's largest efforts to reward and promote understanding and protection of biodiversity. The term, "biodiversity," is a contraction of "biological diversity" that has been defined as all the hereditarily-based variation among all life and at all levels, from genes to species to entire ecosystems.
The current group of winners:
The Bay Foundation and the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation are private foundations established by Charles Ulrick Bay, an industrialist and former U.S. ambassador to Norway from 1946 to 1953, and his widow, Josephine. The Foundations have made grants to educational and cultural institutions, museums, zoos, and schools.
Their grants for species preservation research evolved naturally into a commitment to preserve biodiversity, which is in global decline due to a number of causes, most of them based on human exploitation of natural resources. Among the problems faced by Biodiversity Award winners and their colleagues have been global climate change, the effects of human incursions into formerly protected areas such as Amazonian and temperate forests, the challenge of supplying science-based information to decision-makers, damage inflicted by invasive and exotic species, and the specter of human-caused species extinction.
In 1996, the Foundations inaugurated the Biodiversity Leadership Awards by honoring three winners. Five awards were given in the second round in 1999. Today's announcement brings the number of awards that have been made to thirteen.
EDITORS: For further information on the award process and winners and on the Foundations, for photographs of the winners, and to arrange interviews with the winners, please contact Fred Powledge at fredpowledge@nasw.org or 1-301-373-5466. For more information about the Foundations, their awards, and previous winners, see http://www.bayandpaulfoundations.org .