GOSLINER & BURKE: FROM PARACHUTES TO PARTNERSHIPS 
35 
Bay Area Filipino Community, including the San Francisco consular staff and the Secretary of 
Tourism of the Philippines, who was visiting from Manila. 
Presentations in the Bay Area about the expedition’s findings and the integrated expedition 
model continue. Meg Burke gave a keynote presentation in February 2012 at the second Asian 
Children’s Museum Conference at Museo Pambata in Manila. The theme of the conference was 
Children and Climate Change. Terry Gosliner was invited to make a presentation about the expe¬ 
dition as a model for conservation action to the directors of all the international marine programs 
for Conservation International. The conference was held Febmary 2012, in Mabini, the site of the 
shallow-water expedition. 
KGO TV’s expedition documentary Reefs to Rainforests: the Great Expedition aired in the 
Bay Area on October 22, 2011 and re-aired again November 20, 2011. The special won a regional 
Emmy for Best Informational Educational Program for Northern California.^ 
Lessons Learned 
The 2011 Philippines Biodiversity Expedition helped document tremendous diversity of life in 
a biologically critical and understudied area of the world. It distributed results in a timely fashion 
to many types of audiences: scientists, educators, students, conservationists, government officials, 
and interested citizens. It employed and deepened authentic partnei*ships with Filipinos in all 
aspects of the expedition and strengthened the scientific, educational, and conseiwation infi-astmc- 
ture in the host country. It resulted in new opportunities for fuither integration of research, educa¬ 
tional outreach, and conservation, and it enriched the public experience at the Academy. 
Other Academy expeditions and those by our peer institutions have accomplished portions of 
what this expedition achieved in terms of broader impact beyond the scientific discoveries. For 
example, our colleagues at the Field Museum have helped establish networks of terrestrial scien¬ 
tists in the Philippines and have developed educational materials and trail guides to the mammals 
of Philippine National Parks.^ But for most expeditions, the emphasis has generally been most 
heavily directed to achieving the scientific research. Some of the other elements of outreach and 
conservation have also been accomplished, but were of secondary importance to the organizers and 
participants. 
We wanted the Academy expedition to give equal importance to all aspects. That meant that 
many scientists did not go collecting every day, because field days were inten'upted by trips to 
Manila to local television stations, by radio interviews, or by participating in educational outreach 
events. Sometimes participation in a conference was the order of the day — or walking down to 
the shoreline with local Sea Scouts became more important than logging another dive or collecting 
an additional new species. It also meant that — rather than looking at the environment thi*ough the 
lens of only one particular group of organisms — teams of specialists created a more comprehen¬ 
sive view of the environment. The emphasis was on functioning truly as a collaborative team rather 
than as a gi*oup of specialists working in the same place but seeing themselves as free agents. It 
became a great source of pride to make a new discovery for one of the other participants. This larg¬ 
er view allowed us to make more general conclusions about the state of the health of the environ¬ 
ments where we were working, and these types of observations ultimately had more utility. By 
interacting with local community groups at each site, we learned much about theii' understanding 
of the environment and the challenges they faced. This was a critically important experience for 
helping ensure that the ourteach messages about developing more sustainable practices and recog¬ 
nizing short-temi versus long-term trade-offs were locally relevant. 
Fundamentally, the expedition’s success rested on the support and untiring efforts of many Fil- 
