John Terborgh
American biologist (born 1936)
John Whittle Terborgh (born April 16, 1936) is a James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science at Duke University and co-director of the Center for Tropical Conservation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and for the past thirty-five years, has been actively involved in tropical ecology and conservation issues. An authority on avian and mammalian ecology in Neotropical forests, Terborgh has published numerous articles and books on conservation themes. Since 1973, he has operated the Cocha Cashu Biological Station, a tropical ecology research station in Manú National Park, Peru.
Research career
Raised in Arlington, Virginia, Terborgh graduated from Harvard College in 1958 and received his PhD in plant physiology from Harvard University in 1963. He served on the faculty of the University of Maryland and then, for 18 years, on the faculty of Princeton University. In 1989, Terborgh moved to Duke University, where he joined the faculty of the (now) Nicholas School of the Environment and founded the Duke University Center for Tropical Conservation.
One of the defining features of Terborgh's research is field work in relatively difficult to access tropical regions. Terborgh studied the elevational distributions of tropical birds in New Guinea with college classmate and friend Jared Diamond, and in Peru. Terborgh's study of how competition limits bird ranges involved surveying the Cerros del Sira, "a corner of the world so remote that one must travel a full week to obtain even the most trivial supplies".
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This entry incorporates text from “John Terborgh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.