守護海洋、乾林、西伯利亞虎 3保育學家獲勞力士雄才偉略大獎

 A Russian ecologist protecting Siberian tigers, an American marine biologist, and a Bolivan conservationist of the Gran Chaco tropical dry forest, are among the five winners of the 2012 Rolex Awards for Enterprise. The biennial awards are so-named because they "foster a spirit of enterprise and advance human knowledge and well-being," the timepiece manufacturer says.

Sergei Bereznuk works to preserve the last few hundred Siberian tigers and their habitat, the taiga forest of the Russian Far East, using technology and education targeted to young people.

The Russian Far East is inhabited by 95 percent of the largest tiger subspecies, the Amur or Siberian tiger, Panthera tigris altaica. Today, an estimated 350 to 500 of these top predators roam the frontier region bordering China and the Sea of Japan.

Bereznuk's experience since 1995 with a tiger anti-poaching brigade in the province of Primorsky Krai convinced him that saving the Amur tiger depends the efficiency of anti-poaching measures and also on the education of local people, two elements at the core of his Rolex Award-winning project.

As director of the Vladivostok-based Phoenix Fund, a small, environmental nonprofit organization he has headed for 12 years, Bereznuk and his six-person team attempt to preserve tigers in an area covering 64,092 square miles (166,000 km2). He has developed strong community ties, cultural sensitivity and an extended network of local field workers.

Bereznuk has developed extensive educational and outreach activities to create tiger-friendly attitudes among young people. Phoenix Fund-supported educators create educational materials, films, competitions and eco-events, especially the annual Tiger Day Festivals in Vladivostok and other regional centers.

Barbara Block, a professor in marine sciences at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, earned her Rolex Award for spearheading efforts to preserve part of the Pacific Ocean by tracking marine predators off the North American coast with a series of underwater listening stations.

Block pioneered the use of electronic tags, including implantable archival tags, which are surgically implanted in tunas, and pop-up satellite archival tags, which automatically detach from animals and transmit collected data via satellite.

Block launched the Tagging of Pacific Predators, TOPP, program 12 years ago. She has deployed more than 4,600 electronic tags and collected nearly 300,000 days of animal tracking data. The data reveal previously unknown marine hotspots, migratory highways and details of ocean physics.

One of TOPP's most remarkable findings was that large predators from areas as diverse as the waters off New Zealand, Indonesia and Alaska congregate in the California Current, which flows along North America's west coast from Canada to Baja. Although they may make journeys of thousands of miles into the Pacific basin, they return to the California Current year after year.

Her ultimate goal in the Pacific is the creation of a large, marine UNESCO World Heritage site off the California coast to protect the open ocean wilderness the TOPP research team has discovered.

Erika Cuellar is training indigenous people in Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina to conserve the biodiversity of the Gran Chaco, a tropical dry forest with one of the most diverse ecosystems in South America.

Known for pioneering a participatory approach to conservation, Cuellar started a program in 2007 that provides indigenous peoples with the scientific knowledge and conservation training needed to preserve their rich and fragile ecosystem. She has been working to empower the indigenous Guarani people, who live on the boundaries of the largest of Bolivia's national parks, the Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco.

With their help, Cuellar has helped restore the Gran Chaco's population of the guanaco, a rare camelid species brought back from the brink of extinction.

In conservation, parabiology is accepted as a powerful and sustainable approach, since local people learn scientific methods and ultimately gain the skills required to lead and maintain environmental protection. Indigenous parabiologists can be influential in conveying the value of conservation to indigenous communities, and Cuellar's work has received national and international attention.

She has founded two Bolivian nonprofit organizations focused on conservation and is coordinator of the Bolivian Committee for the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Encouraged by her successes in the national park, Cuellar will use her Rolex Award to extend her work to the wider Gran Chaco region, which spans parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.