"The natural world in which we live is nothing short of entrancing – wondrous really. Personally, I take great joy in sharing a world with the shimmering variety of life on Earth."
– Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy (1941-2021)
Welcome From Director Rachel E. Gallery
About Thomas E. Lovejoy
Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy (1941-2021) is one of the most globally renowned ecologists of modern times, recognized by countless U.S. and international organizations for his life’s work. His scholarship in biodiversity, tropical forests, and climate change focused on how human activity causes habitat fragmentation, pushing biological diversity towards crisis. Dr. Lovejoy conceived the idea of the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments (formerly the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems) project and is credited with introducing the term “biological diversity” (biodiversity) to the scientific community in 1980 along with Edward O. Wilson. He devoted much of his career to working in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. For more than 40 years he conducted research, and brought visitors to Camp 41, part of the Amazon Biodiversity Center he founded near Manaus, Brazil in 1979.
In recognition of the value of his work, Dr. Lovejoy was an elected member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1998, Brazil awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Scientific Merit. In 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He received over 50 Honors, including the Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the Government of France (2014) and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Global Council for Science and the Environment in 2017. In 2022, the National Geographic Society posthumously awarded Dr. Lovejoy the Hubbard Medal, the nonprofit’s highest honor.
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