Baraza

Category: Africa, conservation | Date: May 14 2009 | By: admin

It is with great pleasure that we circulate this announcement

LONDON, UK: 13 MAY 2009 - HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) tonight presented one of the world’s top prizes for grassroots nature conservation – a Whitley Award – to Dino J. Martins, of Kenya, for his work to improve local understanding of, and win greater protection for, the pollinators which underpin farming in and around the Great Rift Valley and Taita Hills.  

Harvard PhD Fellow, Dino Martins, received his award during a ceremony held at the Royal Geographical Society, London, by The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) – the UK-based charity which administers the international awards programme.

His prize includes a Whitley Award project grant of £30,000 - donated by The William Brake Charitable Trust - an engraved trophy, membership of an influential network of Whitley Award winners and international profile-raising opportunities.  

The award to Dino Martins recognises his work with the East Africa Natural History Society (celebrating its centenary this year), to let small-scale farmers know about the vital role insects play in pollinating crops and encourage them to adopt conservation-friendly methods of agriculture. 

The event’s top prize, the £60,000 Whitley Gold Award, went to another African: Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, of Uganda, for a health and conservation programme in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which is helping local villagers and their wildlife neighbours - endangered mountain gorillas - by reducing the cross-infection risks that result from people/ape contact and their DNA similarities.

Her Royal Highness also presented four other £30,000 Whitley Awards to conservation leaders from Bulgaria, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Commenting on Dino Martins’s success, Edward Whitley, who founded the fund and chaired the judging panel, said: “The aim of the Whitley Awards is to find and support conservation scientists whose vision, passion, determination and qualities of leadership mean they are achieving inspirational results in conservation.  In Dino’s case, the judges were especially impressed by the excellent example this project provides of the interdependence of plants, insect pollinators and people in areas often overlooked for their biodiversity value and which grow important quantities and varieties of fruit, flowers and vegetables for Kenya and many other markets.”

The ceremony at which Dino Martins received his accolade was co-hosted by BBC wildlife presenter Kate Humble and held in front of a 400-strong audience that included embassy representatives, donors and leading environmentalists.

Another Kenyan, Leonard Akwany, is also being helped by WFN this year. He has been granted a £10,000 Associate Award for a nature conservation project that will also improve livelihoods at the Lake Victoria Wetland.

WELL DONE DINO!!!

Tags: BBC, bees, conservation, Dino Martins, dudu diaries, Kenya, Whitley Trust for Nature, wildlife

5 responses so far

Category: conservation, wildlifedirect | Date: May 11 2009 | By: admin

Dear Friends

This note is to share with you  some great news. Earlier this year we encouraged Dino Martins, a Kenyan entomologist studying  at Harvard University to apply for a grant from the most  prestigious conservation awards, the Whitley Gold Award. Both Dr Leakey and Paula Kahumbu wrote letter of reference for Dino, and a friend of WildlifeDirect, spent a morning video taping Dino as part of his application.

Dino was shortlisted from 80 candidates and today his proposal will be judged by a panel of experts in London. His proposal is to work with the East African Natural History Society in the Great Rift Valley to and Taita Hills to improve local understanding and awareness of the vital role of insects in the pollination of crops and to encourage more sustainable methods in agriculture to create a better future for people plants and pollinators.

Knowing how amazing Dino is, compelling, enthusiastic, as well as knowledgeable - we are sure that he will win something. Here’s his latest news…

Hi Paula

Just a note to let you know that I am in the UK and just heading in to
the Whitley panel for my interview…

So excited and thanks so much for your input on this - fingers crossed!

Hugs
Dino

We are bubbling with excitement here. Please join us in congratulating Dino for getting this far, and send him your positive thoughts and wishes today right here and on his blog dudu diaries The final announcement will be made on Wednesday evening where Her Royal Highness Princess Anne will present prizes.

Tags: Dino Martins, dudu diaries, Insects, Princess Anne, Whitley, Whitley Awards

11 responses so far

Category: Amazing facts | Date: Nov 26 2008 | By: baraza

When E.O. Wilson said it was  the little things that made the world go round I didn’t really take any notice. But I’ve just discovered that on in every 3 bites of food was pollinated by an insect. That is a fantastic statistic, it means that our very survival depends on them.

As an ecologist I’ve always found insects interesting but it’s so hard to study them, first there are just too many of the darned things, some are anti social and sting and bite, many are too small to see, and some give us nasty diseases. But most of all it’s damn hard to get any books or educational materials on them - compared say to elephants, birds or plants.

Then I met Dino Martins and I suddenly got answers to everything I’d always been curious about, and instantly fell in love with insects.

If you don’t know him already, Dino writes the amazing

Dudu diaries blog about insects, and if his effect on me was profound, it was nothing compared to how he’s changing peoples perceptions all around Kenya. He’s back from Harvard University (where he’s doing his PhD) for a couple of weeks. We had lunch yesterday and he  told me about how he stopped a group of farmers from killing carpenter bees that were visiting a passion fruit farm in western Kenya. Thinking that these large bees were damaging the flowers the farmers went about crushing them and their nests, believing that they were saving their precious crop. After demonstrating that these bees were essential for pollination and production of the passion fruit crop, Dino was able to convince the farmers that they were actually damaging their crop by killing the bees and persuaded them not only to stop killing the bees, but to implement practices that would enhance the bee population and therefore secure a good fruit set of this important cash crop.

At another location he responded to farmers whose eggplant crop had failed for several years. Looking at the fields he noticed that no pollinators were present during the flowering season, and was able to advise the farmers to stop using pesticides which was killing the pollinators. The next year no pesticides were used, pollinators returned and a bumper crop was harvested. In both examples the solutions might sound obvious to anyone who knows about pollination services, but for rural communities education and information are rare. Misinformation and decisions based on ignorance abound which can at best fail to take advantage of natures free service, and at worse destroy these services.

Dino is now working on a new project to use insects as a way of protecting forests. By working with, and involving farming communities and school children, Dino and Nature Kenya (one of Kenya’s most active conservation organizations) aim to save a myriad of endemic and endangered species of plants and animals in rare and vulnerable tropical forest patches located in a sea of humanity. The survival of these forests will depend on their value in the eyes of communities that surround them. He plans to demonstrate the link between agricultural production and healthy pollinator populations that are forest dependent.

For example, he’ has found a native stingless bee that pollinates vanilla, an extremely valuable cash crop that, believe it or not, is pollinated by hand everywhere in the world because of lack of pollinators! Imagine the cost savings just because of the presence of one little stingless bee…

What I really love about his proposed project is that it is simple, is community owned and will be led and monitored by a leading conservation organization that is a key training ground for young conservationists in Kenya. The project will do visual activities and involve local communities and children, they will plant pollinator gardens on school grounds and monitor the pollinators that visit. In this way  communities will gather data about the presence, diversity and abundance of pollinators as well as crop production - they be able to demonstrate the link between the species and abundance and fruit production. For example did you know that strawberries will not form properly if there are too few pollinators? Neither will papayas. I didn’t know any of this before yesterday!

Having this information should enable communities to make management decisions locally and to gather information, document the local knowledge and share it. And Guess what? They will be able to share that information on the internet through the WildlifeDirect blogs as well as a new site that is a wiki resource on all the species of the world. Anyone anywhere can now contribute to and learn about all the creatures on earth through an amazing project that E. O. Wilson is involved with called the Encyclopaedia of Life at this website here

http://www.eol.org/

“The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth.” The plan is to have a page for every single species!

Tags: Dino Martins, dudu diaries, E.O. Wilson, Insects

One response so far