General ecological research has accounted for about 19% of the Foundation’s total expenditures on grants not listed under other headings. A few of these warrant special mention.
In the 1950s, the Foundation made an initial grant toward an ecological survey of the Mau-Mara Area of Masailand, East Africa, contingent upon additional funds being raised to complete the project. These were obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Conservation Foundation. The area in question lies just north of the famous Serengeti Plains. The Mau forest in particular was under serious threat of destruction. The primary objective of the project was to provide guidelines for improved habitat management.
A grant to Connecticut College in 1972 helped finance the second resurvey of vegetation transects in the Bolleswood Natural Area of the Connecticut Arboretum. Initiated in 1952, this long-range study has now been in progress for over fifty years and is yielding significant results.
Grants to William J. Robbins, recently retired as director of the New York Botanical Garden, and his colleague Annette Hervey enabled them to continue their productive research on plant tissue cultures for a few additional years.
On a trip to Mexico, Hubert W. Vogelmann observed that some of the vegetated mountain ranges were adequately supplied with moisture in contrast to comparable deforested slopes that were barren deserts. A grant from the Foundation enabled him to establish weather stations on the mountains which gathered data showing clearly that significant quantities of water were being condensed from fogs passing across the vegetated slopes during the dry season, whereas no such capture occurred on denuded terrain. This clearly demonstrated that the wide-spread deforestation of such areas was creating irreversible changes that are an ecological disaster.
The ecology of the upper canopy of tropical forests has been inadequately studied due to difficulty of access. In 1987, a grant to Melvin T. Tyree, which was matched four-to-one by the Lintilhac Foundation, resulted in developing a mechanical solution to the problem — a large tower crane. One was rented with funds contributed through the United Nations Environmental Program for studies in a dry tropical forest on the outskirts of Panama City, Panama. Some of the results have been published.