ANN ARBOR— Brazil’s Pantanal, a vast wetland that sits in the center of South America, has become the next frontier for leading-edge eco-tourists in search of ever more exotic flora and fauna. “It’s where people go after they’ve been to Africa,” says Shannon Bouton, a Ph.D. student in the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) at the University of Michigan.

This month, Bouton is publishing the results of her unique study of a wading bird colony in the Pantanal in the February issue of Conservation Biology, the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology. The article, co-authored with Peter C. Frederick (University of Florida), is titled “Stakeholders’ Perceptions of a Wading Bird Colony as a Community Resource in the Brazilian Pantanal.” Unlike other research projects that consider only the biological effects of tourism, Bouton has combined her biological research with a study of how the colony serves as a resource for the local community. Her practical suggestions for meeting the twin goals of managing and developing tourism and conserving the colony have attracted the attention of top government officials and diplomats in Brazil and have made her study site at Porto da Fazenda a model for similar efforts in the region.

Today, as a result of those suggestions, the forestry police have posted a guard in front of the colony to control the behavior of tourists and fishermen. A local conservation group, Associa