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Emilia Patrícia Medici, better known as Patrícia Medici, is a Brazilian conservation biologist who focuses on the protection of South America’s Lowland Tapirs and the tropical rainforest. She also works in metapopulation management, community-based conservation, and landscape ecology.

Calling Tapirs “the gardeners of the forest”, Medici created the Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative in 1996. Over the course of her nearly 30-year career, Medici and her team have implemented conservation initiatives such as minimizing roadkill fatalities, monitoring tapirs to better understand their activities, and encouraging citizen participation through environmental education and habitat preservation. She has won several awards for her work such as the Golden Ark Award and the Whitley both in 2008.

As of 2020, Medici and her team plan to bring their efforts to the Amazon forest while continuing their progress in other biomes they’ve worked in (Cerrado, Pantanal, and Atlantic Forest). Some of their plans include creating programs to educate communities on how to successfully coexist with tapirs, assessing the existing threats to the tapirs such as pollution and poaching, and establishing strategies to reduce the number of Tapirs that fall victim to it.

Early life
Medici was born and raised in Brazil.

Education and Career
Medici finished college in 1996. Medici has a Bachelor's Degree in Forestry Sciences from the São Paulo University also known as Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She continued her education and acquired a Master's Degree in Wildlife Ecology, Conservation and Management from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), and eventually a Ph.D. Degree in Biodiversity Management from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, United Kingdom.

Since 1992, she has worked for the Institute of Ecological Research (Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas, IPÊ), she is one of the founding members. . Here, her first professional project was with Black lion tamarin where she would learn the conservation of a species is more than just research but it's also reliant on landscape conservation and educating the community. In 1996, Medici along with a team from the IPÊ set out on a mission to learn more about tapirs and promote their preservation in Brazil. In 2000, Medici became the chairperson of the IUCN SSC Tapir Specialist group.

In 2004, Medici received the Harry Messel Conservation Leadership Award from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In 2008, she was awarded the Future For Nature Award as well as the Whitley Fund for Nature in the United Kingdom, and she's been the recipient of the WFN continuation funding in 2011 and 2014. Medici's used the funding to start the Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative (LTCI) in Pantanal, Brazil, a region of South America where tapirs were never researched. In this year, she also won the Golden Ark Award from the Golden Ark Foundation in the Netherlands.

Medici received the 2011 Research Prize from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. She was one of 39 finalists for the Indianapolis Prize 2014 in 2013. She was awarded the TED Global Fellowship 2014. And in 2019, she received the National Geographic's prestigious Buffett Award for Leadership in Conservation, recognizing her over 25 years of conservation work. In 2020, she was funded once again by the WFN .The WFN founder, Edward Whitley has said, “Patricia’s work is vital to fight deforestation in Brazil and to protect this amazing species that is the tapir. Her dedication to research, education, and capacity building are a brilliant example of an effective work. Patricia Medici is a strong voice in conservation in Brazil and in the world. We are privileged to still be able to support this cause.”

Tapir Conservation & LTCI
Prior to 1992, Medici showed little interest in Tapirs. It wasn’t until she and nine other people created the IPÊ that she fell love with them. At the beginning of her research, little had been known about Tapirs but throughout the last few decades she’s discovered that Tapirs play an important role in the health of their ecosystem.

They contribute to biodiversity of their environments. They have very large home ranges, and since they consume a lot of seed-filled fruits, they're constantly moving and defecating, spreading the seeds throughout their habitat. They have the ability to alter the nature of their environment.

Tapirs face several threats to their population. Such threats include (but are not limited to) wildfires, poaching, pollution, and roadkill. Their lengthy reproduction cycles and high infant mortality rate prevent Tapirs from replenishing their numbers. If a local population of tapirs were to be cut in half, that population isn’t expected to revive itself.

To combat this, Medici and her team have a mitigation strategy for different highways, petition the local government, educate the community to be wary of using pesticides and encourage them to stop poaching/supporting that industry. A lot of people who live in the same environment as the Tapir don’t even know what they are and the few that do believe that they have no intellect. Along with research, teaching the community and changing their perceptions of the Tapirs is essential to its conservation. Medici and her staff have made use of whatever resources they have at their disposal, including the internet, social media marketing, the news, fundraisers and other events, art, and photography.

In her research, Medici has learned that tapirs are very intelligent. They have an abundance of neurons, an amount similar to that of elephants. They are easily trained for medical procedures and interactions with the community. They have incredible swimming abilities and can sit underwater for up to 7 minutes at a time. They have poor hearing and are almost completely blind, but they can detect anything from up to 500 meters away using their sense of smell. Additionally, both tapir males and females look after their young. Medici has many camera trap recordings that show the males actively engaging in the process of raising the young, which is unusual in many species.

Medici and her team have been able to reduce the numbers of tapirs that die each year. For instance, road fatalities were at approximately six a year. If that trend were to continue, in the next couple years that population would be gone. Medici and her colleagues approached the media and the park's owners, and had radars and signs mounted.The number of Tapirs killed in traffic accidents has decreased to one every three years. The team has also trained people throughout the world, some of these people are creating their own conservation initiatives in Brazil and in surrounding countries to save tapirs.

Personal Life
Medici has called Claudio Padua, her vice director who pioneered the study of black lion tamarins, Rudy Rudaran, a conservationist who has worked with the US Smithsonian Institution, and Sharon Matola, a director of the Belize Zoo and one of the first people to encourage tapir conservation, as her own personal Natural World Heroes. Medici's best natural world experience was seeing the Pantanal floodplains for the first time. She remembers arriving there towards the end of the flooding season and seeing many different kinds of animal such as feral pigs, egrets, and capybaras.

Medici is married to Arnaud Desbiez, a French-American conservation biologist who focuses on giant armadillo and giant anteater. Together, they have two children, Gabriel and Duda, and two labradors. They live in Campo Grande, Brazil. In the acknowledgements of her thesis submitted for her PhD in Biodiversity Management at DICE, she thanked Desbiez for all of his support throughout her endeavors. In the 2013 book, The Tapir Scientist: Saving South America's Largest Mammal by Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop, they follow a tapir-searching expedition headed by Medici. The authors have dedicated the book to Medici's children.

Philosophical and/or political views
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Published works
2007: Briefly

2008: Differences in fecal particle size between free-ranging and captive individuals of two browser species.

- The status of the world's land and marine mammals: diversity, threat, and knowledge.

- Order Perissodactyla, Family Tapiridae (Tapirs)

2009: Mineral absorption in tapirs (Tapirus spp.) as compared to the domestic horse.

2010: Assessing the Viability of Lowland Tapir Populations in a Fragmented Landscape - Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Biodiversity Management Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

2012: Population viability analysis: using a modeling tool to assess the viability of tapir populations in fragmented landscapes.

- Distribution, habitat and adaptability of the genus Tapirus.

- Tapir health and conservation medicine.

2014: Health assessment of wild lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris) populations in the Atlantic Forest and Pantanal biomes, Brazil (1996-2012).

2017: Spatial patterns of road mortality of medium–large mammals in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

2018: Moving in the Anthropocene: Global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements.

- BRAZIL ROAD-KILL: a data set of wildlife terrestrial vertebrate road-kills.

2019: Phylogenetics, patterns of genetic variation and population dynamics of Trypanosoma terrestris support both coevolution and ecological host-fitting as processes driving trypanosome evolution.

- Predicting spatiotemporal patterns of road mortality for medium-large mammals.

- Pathological Findings in Lowland Tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) Killed by Motor Vehicle Collision in the Brazilian Cerrado.

- Overcoming the challenge of small effective sample sizes in home‐range estimation

- A comprehensive analysis of autocorrelation and bias in home range estimation

- Sustainability Agenda for the Pantanal Wetland: Perspectives on a Collaborative Interface for Science, Policy, and Decision-Making

2020: HEALTH ASSESSMENT OF WILD LOWLAND TAPIRS (TAPIRUS TERRESTRIS) IN THE HIGHLY THREATENED CERRADO BIOME, BRAZIL.

- A comprehensive framework for handling location error in animal tracking data

- Highways are a threat for giant armadillos that underpasses can mitigate

- Use of unfenced highway underpasses by lowland tapirs and other medium and large mammals in central-western Brazil

2021: Ticks and rickettsial exposure in lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) of three Brazilian biomes

- Rabies Virus Exposure in Wild Lowland Tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) from Three Brazilian Biomes.

- Activity patterns of tayra (Eira barbara) across their distribution

- Lowland tapir exposure to pesticides and metals in the Brazilian Cerrado

Honours, decorations, awards and distinctions

 * Harry Messel Conservation Leadership Award, 2004
 * This award was named after Harry Messel, a professor who served ad the Chair of the SSC Crocodile Specialist Group for a number of years . The award, which was created in 2004, honors individuals who have made a significant contribution to species conservation on the ground or through their leadership. Medici was one of the first to receive this award.
 * Future For Nature Award, 2008
 * Future For Nature is a non-profit organization that helps new, creative, and ambitious conservationists who are dedicated to preserving wild animal and plant species. It is the dedication of these people who will determine the fate of nature. They empower and unite groups, organizations, states, investors, and the general public through their leadership.
 * Golden Ark Award, 2008
 * It is given to individuals who have made significant contributions to environmental protection. About 300 individuals have been honored by the award since its inception.
 * Whitley Fund for Nature, 2008
 * The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) holds the Whitley Awards every year to honor and recognize effective community environmental activists from around the world. The charity's signature environmental grants, worth £40,000 in project support over a year, are awarded after being judged by an experienced academic jury.
 * Mike Walkey Prize, Research Prize from DICE, 2011
 * This award is given to the best postgraduate student in DICE who has completed an MSc, MPhil, or PhD by study.
 * National Geographic's Buffett Award for Leadership, 2019
 * Per year, two awards are given out: one for achievement Latin American and on for achievement in Africa. These people have shown leadership in preserving and sustaining natural resources in their communities and nations, and they are inspiring conservationists who act as role models and mentors.
 * WFN Continuation Funding, 2011, 2014, 2020