FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Sept. 13, 2007)

Dallas Zookeeper Awarded Earthwatch Institute Fellowship to Madagascar

	She spends her days caring for tigers, otters, and almost a dozen species of primates as a zookeeper at the Dallas Zoo. At night,she was completing coursework and recently earned a Master of Arts degree in interdisciplinary studies with a major in zoo and aquarium leadership.

But this summer, Elana Kopel found the time to travel with a team comprised of colleagues of the United Kingdom and Poland as well as Maryland, to Madagascar an island off the coast of Africa, to study lemurs and the forests they live in as part of an Earthwatch Institute research expedition.
Kopel, a six-year employee of the Dallas Zoo, was selected by a panel of curators and managers as this year’s recipient of the fellowship. The funds for the fellowship and the field research experience were provided to the Dallas Zoo by an anonymous donor.

“Elana is an excellent zookeeper and continually seeks out opportunities for professional growth,” said Cynthia Bennett, Ph.D., curator of conservation education and science at the Dallas Zoo. “She ‘walks the walk’ and is a true conservationist. There was no question about her capabilities for this project.”

The Earthwatch Institute trip was led by Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Ph.D., at the Manombo Special Reserve in the rainforest of Madagascar’s southeastern coast. While there, Kopel followed a group of lemurs and took data to identify their diets, activity levels, locations in trees, and social interactions. She also studied the types of trees in the forest, their sizes, and whether they had fruit to support lemurs. Since the majority of the forest in Manambo, Madagascar has been destroyed by logging and a 1997 cyclone, the group tried to learn if there was enough forest growing back to support the lemur population.

“This experience made it very obvious that we need to think broadly when talking about habitat loss in other areas of the world,” Kopel said. “It is not enough to say those people should conserve the land. We need to find ways to help them feed their families or build their homes if they cannot use the land. It is important to consider what we can do locally to help others and enable them to save forests. In the United States, we need to realize that we also are ruining the natural habitats and we should find ways to use less and leave more for our future and the animals.”

	For more information about joining one of Earthwatch Institutes research expeditions, visit www.earthwatch.org or call (800) 776-0188.