Research on Challenges Facing Congo Basin Swamp Forests Wins 2026 Bormann Prize

In 2017, scientists found a vast tropical peatland extending across 16.7 million hectares of Africa’s Congo Basin. The peat swamp forests serve as a carbon sink, absorbing nearly 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, and the discovery ignited scientific interest in understanding the basin’s hydrology and greenhouse gas dynamics.

The population in the region depend upon the peatlands’ swamp forests for their livelihoods, including fishing, hunting, and small-scale agriculture of staple crops such as cassava, a root vegetable. However, the region is experiencing intensifying flooding, rapid economic transition, and weakening of its traditional knowledge and governance systems that are impeding villagers’ capacities to adapt.

Over the course of a year, Yale School of Environment doctoral candidate Katherine Meier interviewed and observed 55 conservation managers and Lac Télé Community Reserve community members within the Republic of Congo, studying how they are navigating the seasonal flooding and conflicts in peatland management.

Her research earned her YSE’s 2026 F. Hermann Bormann Prize. The prize recognizes a doctoral student whose work embodies the legacy of the late YSE Professor F. Herman Bormann, a plant ecologist who called the world’s attention to the threat of acid rain. Bormann taught at YSE from 1966-1993.

“Katherine set out to study the ecology of great apes in the Republic of Congo, but quickly realized the most important aspect of that ecology was the conflict between conservation organizations and local villagers, and pivoted to studying these organizations, writing one of the best ethnographies of conservation policy and practice that has ever been written,” said Michael Dove, the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology and Anthropology, who nominated Meier for the award.

In her study, which will soon be published in Philosophical Transactions B, she and her coauthors describe how seasonal flooding within the reserve varies widely between villages, leading to diversity in strategies community members use to cope with the ecological challenges.

The Lac Télé Community Reserve communities recognize seasons differently and organize agriculture, fishing, hunting, and gathering according to village‑specific flood patterns, not a uniform regional cycle. At the same time, knowledge systems that in the past promoted sustainable use of the forest and rivers are breaking down due to globalization processes such as market integration and prioritization of Western values and religion, Meier said.

Meier and her colleagues argue that incorporating fine-scale local ecological knowledge into peatland science and policy development would improve the accuracy of existing modeling efforts, restrengthen traditional knowledge and value systems, and inform conservation strategies that are more representative of, and relevant to, villagers’ lived experiences.

Meier first began research within tropical swamp forests as a research assistant for The Tuanan Orangutan Research Project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia studying orangutan ecology.

“I actually love swamp forest research, though it isn’t for everyone — your feet are wet all the time and there are lots of bugs,” said Meier. “Even though there are challenges for villagers living in an environment that floods seasonally, many see value in these swamp forests that have such a diversity of natural resources and to which they have deep ancestral ties.”

The Lac Télé Community Reserve is difficult to access, and Meier spent many hours traveling by car and boat just to reach the conservation headquarters there. All other travel for her research was done by boat from there, typically a dugout canoe. Her research team included Tiriel Lokoka Ngoma, a doctoral student in the Republic of Congo’s Marien Ngouabi University and coauthor of the study. They worked primarily in four of the reserve’s villages.

Their study suggests a new conceptual framework, “hydro-social patches,” which draws attention to the intricate patterns and interconnections forged between human and non-humans in water-dominated landscapes. Meier said the concept serves to integrate river ecology with social science to describe how flooding and resource availability in the swamp forests shape — and then are shaped — by human culture.

“Our paper shows that people living along a single river-floodplain system in these peatlands have diverse experiences with flooding and hydrology and thus possess fine-scale knowledge of these processes that are ecologically important for the peatlands,” Meier said.

Four additional students were also honored for their exemplary work at YSE’s 42nd annual Research Day held April 10 at Kroon Hall. Doctoral student Tobias Muellers ’22 MESc earned the Schmitz Prize for best oral presentation for “Asking new questions of old data: predicting chemical properties from spectra”; Kellen Moore ’26 MESc received the Master’s Student Oral Presentation Prize for “Refined Habitat Suitability Modeling of Japanese Barberry for Forested Landscapes”; Laura Obando-Cabrera, a doctoral student, was awarded the Best Poster Presentation prize for her poster on “Agricultural fires escape into the Amazon forest amid landscape transformation”; and Allen Gil ’26 MFS received the New York Botanical Garden Graduate Students Program’s inaugural NYBG Science Award for “Fragmentation Typologies, Trajectories, and Path Dependence in Urban Mangrove Landscapes of Southeast Asia.”