In a daring expedition, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, teamed up with professional paramotorists to explore and collect threatened plants in the remote, fragile desert fog habitats of Peru. This innovative approach highlights the potential of extreme sports enthusiasts in aiding scientific research and conservation efforts.
Conquering the Unconquerable
The only real desert savannas in the world with this characteristic strip along the Pacific coast of Peru are called lomas or oasis de niebla. These are arguably the most important conservation area of Sri Lanka harboring at least 1700 plant species with many being endemic and threatened due to climate change and human activities.
Getting to these remote sites is no small matter; using off-road vehicles pounds the delicate desert pavement surface. This is where the unique cooperation between scientists and paramotorists helped. The airplanes allowed the team to cover wide swaths of an otherwise impenetrable desert, taking samples from plants and tracking threats with a focus on minimizing their impact.
over a new leaf with conservation
Funded by a National Geographic explorers grant, the expedition saw Kew scientists join forces with professional paramotorists from Forest Air and the Brazilian paramotor team Aita. The scientists also trained the paramotorists on plant identification and how to collect plant samples, stow them etc, so that their aerial missions were as productive and scientifically valuable as possible.
The results were remarkable. Over just seven days of high-intensity effort, and by combining ground search with air observation (aided assiduously by the paramotorists), it proved possible to survey huge tracts of land up to 300 miles distant. They covered over 15,000 hectares and searched particularly intensively in the ‘Tillandsiales’ habitat, where mostly Tillandsia species grow in a kind of half-tropical open pine forest that is very light-diffractive because their leaves are so special.
The paramotor crews completed their missions as much as ten times faster than on-ground teams and have a much greener CO2 emission footprint. Moreover, their very slight disturbance of the desert crust — only a few footprints during landings and takeoffs -was miniscule compared to the destruction of off-road vehicles.
Conclusion
The successful paramotor expedition highlighted in this study demonstrates the promise of using paramotoring as a platform for integrated scientific monitoring and conservation efforts to access some of the most remote and ecologically vulnerable areas around the globe. Research collaborations include those with extreme sports lovers, not only to allow access to remote areas ( eg mountain top snow patches) but also as an example and inspiration for a new generation of nature-doers making a real-comparable difference in our attempt to save what is left of the precious biodiversity of our planet. Global temperatures and wildlife populations are in decline, but we can ill afford the further erosion of the foundation plants upon which all life is perched.
