Doctoral Candidate Penetrates Ugandan Forest

Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park “rightly deserves its name,” reports Tharcisse Ukizintambara, an Environmental Studies PhD candidate.  Nonetheless, Ukizintambara has established himself at the park’s research center where he will study the L’Hoest’s monkeys. Little data has been collected on these primates, but Ukizintambra has directed his dissertation research on edge effects, distribution, and behavior. Edge effects encompass the influence of change in vegetation at the edge of forests and agricultural land on the foraging monkeys.

Ukizintambra is a 2002 recipient of the Beinecke Scholarship, awarded by the Wildlife Conservation Society. His previous African research focused on the range of mandrills in Lope National Park in Gabon. He will present a paper on that project to the International Primatological Society, which will convene at the end of June in Entebbe.

Most recently, Ukizintambra served as managing director of the Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation at Antioch New England. He plans to continue his research at the Bwindi camp, fifty miles from the city of Kampala, Uganda, for the next year. During that time, he intends to confer with other Antioch students who are conducting research in central Africa. He will also find his advisor, Dr. Beth Kaplin, only two hundred miles away, where she is setting up a conservation biology program at the National University of Rwanda with her MacArthur grant.