How a Citizen Science Organization Aims to Preserve the Places It Brings Tourists to Study

Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area boasts enormous biodiversity—pink dolphins, rare monkeys, giant river otters, reptiles, and hundreds of birds and different types of plants. It’s also one of the most prominent examples of a government recognizing that environmental conservation doesn’t require keeping people out. That instead, it’s possible for humans to coexist with nature and help protect it.

And the region’s protected status is supported, in part, by research conducted by tourists.

Biologist Richard Bodmer has been welcoming visitors to his research station along the Yarapa River, on a strip of Indigenous territory between Tamshiyacu Tahuayo and another area co-managed by Indigenous communities, the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, to help track wildlife and collect other ecosystem data for decades. His guests arrive through a partnership with Earthwatch Expeditions, a tour company that connects people with scientists carrying out long-term research projects around the world and invites them to engage in “participatory science.” Earthwatch runs nearly two dozen trips: to study the ecosystems of polar bears in the Arctic, whooping cranes in Texas, trees in Acadia National Park, and large mammals in Kenya, among others.

In the Amazon, research guides the daily activities of the (typically) eight-day itinerary. Participants sleep on a restored vessel first brought to the region at the start of the 19th century to transport rubber. Solar energy is used to power air conditioning and provide hot water for showers. The goal, Bodmer says, is to support conservation strategies that protect ecosystems and the people who rely on them simultaneously. A bonus is that economic activity tied directly to keeping those ecosystems intact helps to remind the government that effective conservation is valuable in its own right.

Every evening, participants identify their research targets: choose a particular animal they’d survey, in a particular location and across a specified radius, during a particular window of time. Searching for parrots and other birds means taking a small boat up or down the river. “There, we would watch and wait,” says Jared Katz, a psychotherapist in Vermont who joined an Earthwatch trip earlier this year with his wife, Jennifer Jewiss. “One of us held a GPS and would call out the coordinates at each of the stops we made that morning, and someone else had a clipboard and grid to record the data. The others of us (and those two as well) watched for flight.”

The collection of data over time has led to a greater understanding of the ecosystem. For instance, Bodmer says, birds shifting where they roost might suggest changes in the aquatic landscape; the recent flooding in the region appears to be impacting primates, which move easily across the canopy, less than animals living on the ground.

What stands out about Bodmer’s Amazon riverboat trip is that travelers spend time in a region that’s now government-protected and Indigenous-managed—in part because of the findings of his previous research groups.

The actual ecofriendliness of ecotourism varies a great deal. In general, small-scale operations, local ownership, and community involvement are key, says Gyan Nyaupane, who researches ecotourism, protected area management, and Indigenous Peoples and serves as the director of Arizona State University’s Center for Sustainable Tourism.

And while the easiest way to minimize your carbon footprint and protect natural resources is to not travel, and often the most appropriate way to engage with remote communities is to leave them alone, the reality is that governments want to see economic growth. “What is the best approach to economic development? Is it better to mine these places? Or build dams, clear land for agriculture?” says Nyaupane. “Ecotourism is probably more sustainable than any other extractive industry.”