Patricia Wright (USA & Madagaskar)Patricia Wright (USA & Madagaskar)
Research field:
| Patricia Wright's main fields
of interest include primate behavioral ecology, conservation and ecological
monitoring of tropical ecosystems. Her field work has been in rain forests
of Peru, the chaco of Paraguay, rainforests in Sabah, Malaysia, the Philippines,
and Madagascar. For the last decade, as Director of the Institute for the
Conservation of Tropical Environments, based at Stony Brook, she has been working on an integrated conservation and development project in southcentral Madagascar, and is currently concentrating on training Malagasies in biodiversity science and setting up long term ecological monitoring sites in seven sites within this Madagascar national park, as well as monitoring the corridor areas between protected areas in Madagascar. Longterm monitoring sites document presence and abundance of targeted groups of insects, birds, chameleons, plants, small mammals, primates. With Malagasy collaborators, she has developed an international Biodiversity Research Station at Ranomafana National Park which has produced over 250 puplications, 57 Masters Theses and 15 PHD dissertations. For the past 13 years she has been documenting the behavior, ecology and demography of Milne Edwards sifaka and three species of bamboo lemurs. She and her collaborators have begun recent projects on parasites, disease and detoxification abilities of these lemurs in their natural habitat. Her most recent publications include papers on seed dispersal in a Malagasy rainforest, effects of predation on lemur populations, demography of lemur populations, global primate extinctions and the future of primate communities. |