Zuzana Buřivalová, associate professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the tenth recipient of the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award from the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The $100,000 prize honors Dr. Buřivalová for her research that leverages bioacoustic methods to measure the health of tropical forests around the globe. She records and analyzes the soundscapes of understudied ecosystems and translates the data into actionable evidence for use by conservationists, officials, and communities.
“I work to give voice to tropical forest biodiversity so that it can be considered in decisions that shape its future,” said Dr. Buřivalová. “This is urgent: Deforestation is slowing, but tropical biodiversity loss — through forest degradation, climate change and overhunting — is not. Even some natural climate solutions implemented in forests result in biodiversity loss, through their sole focus on carbon.”
Dr. Buřivalová, principal investigator of the Sound Forest Lab, has traveled around the world for her research, conducting fieldwork in areas such as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Peru, and Ecuador, where she has pioneered the application of bioacoustics in remote tropical forests. She currently leads the Soundscape Baselines Project, an initiative to create acoustic time capsules of the world’s most intact forests as soon as possible, and the Conservation Effectiveness Initiative, an open platform designed to better understand which conservation strategies are working and which are not.
In accepting her latest honor, Dr. Buřivalová said, “The forests of the world are very unique places. They sound different. They look different. They smell different. They have different meanings for the communities who work really hard to protect them. I invite everyone to think about this amazing diversity of forests and ecosystems we have on this planet, and to work together to protect them.”
Dr. Buřivalová is a graduate of the University of Oxford in England, where she majored in biological sciences. She earned a master’s degree in environmental science from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and a Ph.D. in tropical forest conservation and ecology from ETH Zürich in Switzerland.