In today’s post, the first of 2025 we are going to talk about our plans for this new year work. This year started with a big challenge; we didn’t get funding for our proposed activities that will also was going to help us to continue our monitoring of primate populations in small fragments located in private land. Every time I face this rejection make me wonder if one of the reasons for these rejections had something to do with being working in private lands or because all the species with which we work are categorized as Vulnerable or Low Concern and therefore, they seem to have more time for them before they need urgent help. It also makes me wonder about my communication skills and how much I still need to learn about funding applications, despite rejections being part of science it is still difficult to get through the fist shock of each grant rejection. However, we still have plans for this 2025 and will continue applying for grants over the following months to try to achieve our plans.We are planning to continue monitoring primate populations in small fragments located in private lands as demography data and birth and death mortalities for the three endemic species in our study area doesn’t exist and it is data difficult to get due to monkey’s long-life span. Despite the 20 year we had being in the study area, some years we don’t have good enough data, and it is important for the conservation of our species of study.

We also want to implement a couple of pilot projects using ornate titi monkeys as flag species: one focus on education of small children and the second focus on connecting small fragments through living fences. As I mention in our last post of 2024, one of the main messages from our ornate titi monkey distribution project is the need to connect and protect every single forest fragment present in the distribution area of this endemic species, especially in the north, as it is highly fragmented and the two National Parks in which the species is present seems to be not very effective if its deforestation rates continue to increase as it had done over the past decade.These two pilot projects hopefully can be replicated to other areas of the distribution of ornate titi monkeys, which also are need it of connectivity measures that help not only ornate titi monkeys but other charismatic species. One of these areas in which we hope to start working during the new year is Vista Hermosa, where local tourism guides are very interested in help to protect ornate titi monkeys.

A more desktop type of project we like to work on during this year are some of our management data that needs to be publish as well as a connectivity project based on the information we collected over the past two years for two of the endemic species in our study area, Colombian squirrel monkeys (Saimiri albigena) and ornate titi monkeys (Plecturocebus ornatus), both categorized as Vulnerable. Hope fully we will get funding to make all these plans possible in the new year…

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