Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation

Fellowship Year: 2005

Academic Background: -

Current Position: Director, Mache-Chindul Project , Pinchot Institute for Conservation

Dr. Amy Rogers is currently Director of the Mache-Chindul Project with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation in Ecuador’s coastal Esmeraldas Province. Thanks to Switzer Leadership Grant support, Amy was able to self-design this position with the aim of realizing the integrated conservation solutions that she and some 20 colleagues developed during nearly ten years of research in the same region. Begun in 2008, her current position has two overarching goals. One is to reconnect the now-isolated Mache-Chindul Reserve--one of two remaining expanses of Chocó rainforest in Ecuador--to its larger sister reserve Cotacachi-Cayapas via the construction of a wildlife corridor. This goal builds upon Amy’s Ph.D. research, which was aimed at accelerating forest recovery by specifically targeting the ecological obstacles that act to derail mature forest species establishment. Goal two is to facilitate the development of sustainable economic alternatives to deforestation for communities within Mache-Chindul. This goal will be approached in collaboration with Switzer fellow Josh Donlan, via one of the first pilot tests of the 'environmental mortgages' conservation finance model. Amy’s prior experience in conservation research is diverse, including forest fragment regeneration dynamics in Guatemala, human-altered trophic cascades in the Aleutian Islands, the ecological impact of megafauna hunting in Guatemala, sea turtle nest transplantation in Baja California, an EIA of seismic retrofit construction on California harbor seals, and behavioral studies of a severely bottlenecked northern elephant seal population. She holds a Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from UCLA, a Master’s in Ecology & Systematic Biology from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Biology from UC Santa Cruz. Amy lives in a 3-story bamboo house on the beach in Ecuador with her husband Morongo and their son Kai.

Expertise: Conservation Science & Biology, Int'l Conservation & Developmt, Natural Resource Management