For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer/Nancy O’Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) DECEMBER “Island Biodiversity” Featured Scientist Steve Goodman Zoology Department Field Biologist, Birds and Mammals Since he joined The Field Museum in 1989, Field Biologist Steve Goodman has spent most of his time in Madagascar, where he lives, conducting biological surveys in the country’s dwindling forests and training local scientists as Coordinator of the Ecology Training Programme (ETP), a collaboration of WWF-Madagascar and the Université d’Antananarivo, where Goodman is a faculty member. Located off the southeastern coast of Africa, the island of Madagascar is home to an unparalleled array of plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth, including the entire primate family of lemurs. But its biodiversity is threatened by habitat destruction as a growing human population practices slash-and-burn agriculture, destroying the forests on which the animals depend. Goodman has discovered several new species of birds and mammals and is conducting a study of recently deposited animal fossils with Malagasy students to learn how the local wildlife is affected by natural versus human factors. Most recently, he co-edited the book “The Natural History of Madagascar,” to be published in November 2003 by The University of Chicago Press. It is the first comprehensive survey of the island’s plant and animal life published since the late 1800s, and Goodman hopes it will generate more scientific interest in the island. “Madagascar has always been a mysterious island,” Goodman writes in the book’s introduction. “Everything remains to be discovered, nothing is commonplace, and all seems new.” In the last few years, Goodman and his colleagues have focused their biological inventories on Madagascar’s dry western forests – the habitat most threatened by human activity. Continue