![]() – to map and analyze gorilla movements and have collaborated with staff and students from Emory University to study aspects of the health of gorillas and the overall ecosystem. We’ve had a more than 15-year partnership with Georgia Tech – where I earned my Ph.D. The city’s strength in higher education has allowed us to forge valuable research partnerships. Atlanta provides an environment teeming with opportunity for a global nonprofit. The Atlanta City Council recently proclaimed Gorilla Appreciation Day to honor our 25-year milestone, but the gratitude is ours. We’re working directly with communities to protect 330,000 acres of their Congo Basin habitat, the lungs of the planet that help slow the rate of climate change. They’re on the road to extinction without major intervention. The Grauer’s population has declined an estimated 80 percent since the mid-1990s. In those 25 years, we took a big step to expand beyond Rwanda and began working in Democratic Republic of the Congo to protect the Grauer’s gorilla – the mountain gorilla’s close cousin. We recently we saw them upgraded from critically endangered to endangered – back from the brink of extinction. Since then, with daily monitoring and protection, the tiny mountain gorilla population has nearly doubled. But the trackers and scientists at our Karisoke Research Center never left the gorillas, and we found a committed conservation partner in Rwanda’s new government. Their Rwandan home was still recovering from the genocide. When we moved to Atlanta in 1995 at the invitation of the zoo’s then-CEO Terry Maple, mountain gorillas’ future was uncertain. We’ve seen mountain gorillas – the “gorillas in the mist” that we study and protect – beat Dian Fossey’s own dire prediction that they would be extinct by 2000. From our modest offices nestled behind the orangutans at Zoo Atlanta, we’ve had a major global impact. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is celebrating a quarter-century headquartered in Atlanta. Tara Stoinski, CEO and chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Here, trackers done personal protective equipment in the field to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus to gorillas.Įditor’s note: This commentary was written by Dr. ![]() The Atlanta-based Fossey Fund has provided scholarships for more than 50 African staff, and more than 3,000 African undergraduates have participated in capacity-building programs. ![]()
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