Apes never evolved in the New World, but the Neotropics have a wonderful variety of monkeys. One species, the golden lion tamarin, lives in the Atlantic Coastal Rainforest of Brazil. Compared to its size in the 17th century when Europeans first arrived in South America, only seven percent of the Atlantic Forest remains. Yet there is an astounding diversity of animals and plants, many of which are found nowhere else in the world. Thus most international conservation organizations put a high priority on saving the Atlantic Forest ecosystem. The Associação Mico-Leão Dourado (AMLD) (Golden Lion Tamarin Association) is one of the most prominent Brazilian non-governmental conservation organizations working in the area.

Through the work of the Association, its founders and its collaborators, the golden lion tamarin population has increased from a mere 300 in 1983 to more than 1,600 today. The species has been officially “downlisted” from critically endangered” to “endangered”, the first such recognition for any primate species. This success has resulted from a blend of efforts, including study of the behavioral ecology of the species, rescue and translocation of remant populations, habitat recovery and reserve management, enhanced law enforcement, reintroduction of captive-born tamarins, and community conservation education. AMLD’s education program focuses on “multipliers”; people whose actions and decisions influence similar actions and decisions by many others. Teachers and government officials are “multipliers.

In 2005, Great Ape Trust helped to fund AMLD’s teacher training program. Patricia Mie, AMLD’s education coordinator, met with 300 teachers from the communities surrounding golden lion tamarin habitat, and selected 30 for an intensive two-year program to increase awareness of the links between tamarins, forest health, and human well-being. As a result of the first year of the course, the teachers have conducted more than 260 environmental assignments with their students, combining mathematics, art, biology, language studies, writing, history and outdoor activities. More than 75 percent of the teachers took their students outdoors for some of these activities, demonstrating a new appreciation for the environment. Sometimes other teachers ask to bring their classes to the Poço das Antas Biological Reserve, the home of wild golden lion tamarins and site of AMLD’s headquarters. AMLD maintains a small museum-type display, as well as an informative nature trail in the Reserve. Teachers requesting a class visit were asked to come to the reserve beforehand for a half-day briefing, so that they could then make the class visit more informative. Ms. Mie and her staff also work intensively with local landowners with reintroduced tamarins on their properties. These landowners are wealthy and influential, and thus are “multipliers”. More directly, through collaboration with these landowners, more than 7,000 acres of forest have been added as tamarin habitat. The Trust sees community conservation education as an effective and essential tool for the preservation of biodiversity, and AMLD’s program is regarded as a model for efforts with apes and other primates.

Web site: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/EndangeredSpecies/GLTProgram/GLTP/AMLD.cfm