Christine’s Story
We are excited to launch the final two films in our series of TEAM Stories. In addition to Badru’s Story and Patricia’s Story, we’ve added a final chapter, Christine’s Story, and a short introduction to the series. Each film profiles a different protocol and we definitely saved the highest for last.
Site manager Christine Fletcher must overcome her fear of heights to monitor climate in Pasoh Forest Reserve in Malaysia. Her work is part of the TEAM Network, a global web of field stations that provide an early warning system for loss of biodiversity in tropical forests. TEAM’s climate protocol measures temperature, humidity, rainfall and solar radiation to help researchers understand the effects of climate change on biodiversity.
The climate station in Pasoh is located at the top of rickety aluminum tower that climbs 170 feet above the forest floor. (Not all sites have one of these; it was just the simplest way to avoid shading from vegetation at this particular site.) Over a week we made seven climbs up the tower to film Christine at work and to place various time-lapse cameras. It was exciting every time.
Though our focus for this film was the climate protocol, all field sites collect camera trap, vegetation and climate data. A second objective for Christine’s Story was to show how these disparate protocols can work together to help guide conservation action at local, regional and global scales. Together with the talented folks at Globaïa, we designed a motion graphic sequence that uses real data to illustrate how 18 field sites continuously feed three types of information to TEAM’s central servers over the course of a year. The data is then available to the public in near real-time.