Tara Massad (third from right) with some of her students and the controlled burn team in Gorongosa National Park
Fall/Winter 2024
Tara Massad
Instructor, Environmental Sciences
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Gresham, Oregon, so I was very excited to come to OSU. I am really grateful to be back “home” to be a part of conservation and education in Oregon.
When and how did you know that you wanted to be a scientist?
This is a tricky question. I think it became clear to me in college when I started taking biology classes and realized I would never get tired of learning how nature works.
You work in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, spending part of your year there. Can you describe the work that you do there? How did you become associated with the park?
I have been working in the park since 2014, and it really is one of my favorite serendipity stories. First, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mozambique, so I have had a connection to the country for many years. Then, in 2013, EO Wilson wrote an article about the restoration of Gorongosa National Park for National Geographic. I was totally inspired, and I decided it couldn’t hurt to write the park a letter and ask if they might need an ecologist who knew Mozambique and spoke Portuguese, and, lucky for me, the letter arrived just when the park was looking for a research manager for new lab facilities named in honor of EO Wilson.
Eventually, I became the director of the BioEducation Program we created in the park to train Mozambican conservation biologists. I spent most of my time running the Gorongosa Master’s in Conservation Biology Program — a degree we created and the only master’s program held entirely in a national park. In order to provide the students with a bit of a research playground, I designed a couple of long-term experiments we have running in the park — one on reforestation and another on the effects of fire and large herbivores on savannas.
How do you infuse what you learn in a distant landscape like Mozambique into what you teach your students here in Corvallis?
I am lucky to teach Tropical Ecology and a case studies course focused on restoration so I often draw on examples from Gorongosa. I also made a very novice “safari” for my Ecampus students. I hope to start bringing OSU students to Gorongosa next fall!
You have done research on tropical plant chemistry and how it affects biodiversity. Can you give us a short primer on how that works?
Plants and insects are the two most diverse groups of higher organisms, so if we understand how they interact, we understand much of biodiversity. The majority of insects feed on plants, limiting plant growth, which allows many different species of plants to coexist, especially in the tropics. But, insects don’t perceive plants based on what they look like or what their scientific names are—they perceive their would-be host plants based on their chemistry. To defend themselves, plants have evolved thousands of different chemical compounds that can limit insect damage . To me, this invisible world of plant chemistry and how it mediates interactions between these two hyperdiverse groups of organisms is endlessly fascinating.
What’s the best recent scientific paper you’ve read? How about a recent non-scientific read?
My favorite paper, by an excellent scientist (Paul Fine) and the student of my ecological heroine (Lissy Coley), is: Fine, P.V.A., I. Mesones and P.D. Coley. 2004. Herbivores promote habitat specialization by trees in Amazonian forests. Science. 305:663-665. It’s a simple but very insightful look at how herbivores generate plant diversity and supports one of the most highly cited hypotheses in chemical ecology, which connects plant defenses to resource availability.
For a non-scientific book, I recommend reading about the Amazon and the work of Richard Evans Schultes and his student, Wade Davis, in Davis’ book, “One River.” It’s a real life ethnobotanical adventure story and one of my favorite books.
