The Güepajé Project
by KIKE CALVO
Word of Dances was born as an artistic fusion of classic ballet, a minimalist perspective, where my subjects merge with their surrounding in an almost magical way. As I immersed myself into the World of Dances, I fell in love with the richness of folklore and its traditions, specially in Latin America. As a natural evolution, my life-long photographic project on dance did only made sense, by expanding its existence, with the inclusion of a detailed, yet graphically superb, documentation of the intangible representations of culture, expressed through dance, music, oral expressions and traditional attires. In such way, The Güepajé Project, pronounced wepaheh, was born.
As result of the rich folk music heritage in Latin America, almost every traditional community in the continent practices some form of folk dancing. Folk dances are typically performed for the pleasure of the participants and do not require an audience, therefore overlapping somewhat with tribal dances, defined as dancing originally from African tribes, often associated with syncretic religious practices like Santeria and Candomble – and some types of social dancing. Furthermore, when a traditional folk dance is perform onstage in a formal concert, its steps and patterns may be those of folk dance, but it has been removed from the context of folk culture(*).
The hours spent researching Colombia for the creation of Colombia Photo Expeditions, unveiled a new understanding of the intercultural mesh of Latin America. After documenting the Barranquilla Carnival in February 2018, I fell i love with a Colombian popular term that was perfect to describe my folk dance series within World of Dances. Even the word “Güepajé” does not exist in the real academy of Spanish language dictionary, it is a popular interjection to show happiness in the north coast of Colombia. The singers of Cumbia and Vallenatos shout “Güepajé” to transmit good feeling or to increase the enthusiasm, and the dancers shout it that expressed joyfulness.
The Güepajé Project is a collection of photographs craft with a true love for cultural diversity and traditions, with the humble attempt to visually preserve expressions, that one day, may be well gone.
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
As Scaven and Rafferty 2013 described, there is relatively very little research on the physiology of many crucial pollinators influenced by warming temperatures. On their new book (*) Tree Pollination Under Global Climate Change , authors Climate change has been known to impact plant pollination by changing flowering phenology and by distressing the activity of pollinators.
Mismatches could impact plants by impairing decreased insect visitation that means less pollen deposition, whereas pollinators could face reduced food availability. However, in some circumstances, pollinator–plant synchrony does not cause mismatches, due to generalist pollinator species keeping pace with changes in forage-plant flowering by switching between host plants . Animal biology and ecology associated with pollination i.e. population, reproductive aspects, and activity – flight, etc., are essential for understanding the impacts manifested by climate change. This is evident in many tropical regions worldwide, where, animal pollinators comprise much more species and interactions, when compared to temperate conditions
(*) Ramírez F., Kallarackal J. (2018) Plant-Insect Phenology and Pollination. In: Animal biology and ecology associated with pollination i.e. population, reproductive aspects, and activity – flight, etc., are essential for understanding the impacts manifested by climate change.. SpringerBriefs in Agriculture. Springer, Cham
Header Photo: Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. © Kike Calvo
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Tree Pollination Under Global Climate Change (SpringerBriefs in Agriculture)
Colombia Photo Expeditions: Photo Gallery
by KIKE CALVO
Photos taken by National Geographic Creative photographer Kike Calvo during our Expeditions around Colombia.
Uncover Diverse Colombia: Caribbean Expedition Photo Gallery, Feb. 2018
by KIKE CALVO
A selection of photographs taken by the participants of our February 2018 Caribbean Colombia Photo Expedition. Participant list include: Christopher Calonje, Anna Calonje, Nano Calvo, Vivian Carrascal, Jen Gussman, Jim and Deborah Frank, Amy Mackling, Jen Hamilton, Pat Robinson, Susanne Chantal, Bob Schafer, Susan Bowman, Joe and Gigi Shurman and Grace O’Mally. All images belong to the photographers. To join our 2019 Expedition, visit or email us.
Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
The Asociación Colombiana de Ictiólogos (ACICTIOS), the largest network of fish experts in Colombia, has created a reference list of all the fresh water species in the country.
After Brazil, Colombia holds the Second place in the number of fresh water species, with a total of 1494, 374 of them endemic. From this total, 706 live in the Amazon, 663 in the Orinoquia, 223 in the Caribbean, 220 in the Magdalena-Cauca region, and 130 in the Pacific. All the results are available free of charge through Sistema de información en Biodiversidad de Colombia (SIB Colombia).
Learn more about the Academic Paper here.
Photo: Cristales Selva, Caño Cristales. © Kike Calvo
Freshwater Fish Checklist in Colombia
Freshwater Fish Checklist in Colombia by Region
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Ichthyology
Fishes: An Introduction to Ichthyology (5th Edition)
Fishes: A Guide to Their Diversity
Ethnobotany
One River. Wade Davis
Travel
Moon Colombia (Travel Guide)
47 Amazing Things to See and Do in Colombia
Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide)
Colombia (National Geographic Adventure Map)
National Geographic Traveler: Colombia, 2nd Edition
National Geographic Society Honors President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia for his Commitment to Conservation
by KIKE CALVO
Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
The National Geographic Society recently recognized President Juan Manuel Santos of the Republic of Colombia for his unwavering commitment to conservation. In a ceremony at Society headquarters, Gary E. Knell, president and CEO of National Geographic Society, along with Jean Case, chairman of the National Geographic Society Board of Trustees, honored President Santos for his dedicated efforts to protect Colombia’s environment. Colombia is one of world’s richest countries with respect to biological and cultural diversity, and President Santos has done more than many elected leaders in the Americas to expand protected areas so they’re enjoyed by generations to come.
I am proud that a selection of my Colombian land and drone footage was included in the video presented to President Santos during the event. You can see the full video in Spanish here.
Photo © Sora DeVore / National Geographic Society
Since his election to the presidency in 2010, President Santos, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made significant strides on behalf of the environment, increasing the total area of Colombia’s network of protected areas to more than 6,500 square miles on land and sea. Most notably, he more than doubled the size of Chiribiquete National Park, located in the heart of Colombian Amazonia. The park contains a variety of natural wonders, from “tepuis” — table-top mountains with isolated, unique ecosystems — to some of the most botanically diverse lowland forests in the northern Amazon. The amazing animal species in Chiribiquete include jaguars, tapirs and birds found in no other region on Earth.
Photo © Sora DeVore / National Geographic Society
Featured photo: National Geographic Society President and CEO Gary E. Knell (left) stands with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia (right) at a special ceremony honoring President Santos for his unwavering commitment to conservation held at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 2017. Photo by Sora DeVore/National Geographic
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Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
On a recent article on Environmental Values, an international peer-reviewed journal from White Horse Press, about philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, geography, anthropology and ecology authors Nicolás Acosta García, Katharine Farrell, Hannu Heikkinen and Simo Sarkki focused on the remote biodiversity hotspot of Utría National Park in Colombia.
The Park encompasses ancestral territories of the Embera indigenous peoples and borders territories of Afro-descendant communities in El Valle.
The authors explore environmental value conflicts regarding the use of the park, describing them as a Wicked Problem that has no clear solution. Juxtaposing how the territory is perceived by different communities, they employ Faber et al.’s heuristic of the three tele of living nature to search for deficiency in the third telos, service, which we take to be symptomatic of Wicked Problems.
Based on field data encoded using the three-tele heuristic, concerning how the respective communities would like to use the park area, they identify deficiencies in the third telos and develop recommendations regarding how these might be addressed.
Full article: A Teleological Approach to the Wicked Problem of Managing Utría National Park . Authors: Acosta García, Nicolás; Farrell, Katharine N.; Heikkinen, Hannu I.; Sarkki, Simo. Source: Environmental Values, Volume 26, Number 5, October 2017, pp. 583-605(23)
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Utria, Parque Nacional Natural, Choco-Colombia (Spanish Edition)
Estudio de La Costa Colombiana del Pacifico (Classic Reprint) (Spanish Edition)
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
A new journal article in Caldasia about the pollen of Colombian magnolias by Marcela Serna-González and César Velásquez-Ruiz was recently published by the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
The articles unveils how Colombia, with 36 species, has the highest number of species of the family Magnoliaceae in South America. In spite of the family’s evolutionary importance and significant threats to species survival, information is still lacking about Colombian Magnoliaceae due to a paucity of research. In this article, the pollen morphology of fourteen Magnolia species from Colombia is described based on size, shape, apertures, exine and sculpture.
The high uniformity of pollen morphology among the Colombian species supports the most recent classification of the American magnolias.
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Pollen of colombian magnolias.Marcela Serna-González and César Velásquez-Ruiz
Caldasia. Vol. 39, No. 1 (Enero – Junio de 2017), pp. 59-67
Published by: Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Learn More:
Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
Herbal Medicine Natural Remedies: 150 Herbal Remedies to Heal Common Ailments
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
On a recent article published by Revista Espacios, the authors described how one of the most relevant stages of coffee processing is drying due to the fact that it affects the quality of the organoleptic properties of the product. At this stage, there are crucial variables such as the drying time, temperature, airflow, and the physical-chemical characteristics of the drying agent in contact with the grains, and the thickness of the drying layer, among others.
Olmos, Duque and Rodriguez reviewed the coffee drying process, the current technologies used at a national level and international technological development opportunities in order to identify the current status of the process.
As a conclusion, the article explained how in Colombia, coffee drying has been made by traditional methods; advances generally have led to improve the existing technologies; this help having better efficiency and less pollution. This research process in Colombia is limited to the scarce knowledge of coffee growers in relation to innovation and to the lack of available resources in the sector to finance further research.
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State of the art of coffee drying technologies in Colombia and their global development
Luis Carlos OLMOS Villalba 1; Eduardo Alexander DUQUE Grisales 2; Elizabeth RODRIGUEZ 3
Learn More:
Coffee in Colombia, 1850-1970: An Economic, Social and Political History (Cambridge Latin American Studies) by Marco Palacios
Coffee and conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 Paperback – 1978 by Charles W Bergquist
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
The Colombian Caribbean, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, is facing great challenges in biodiversity conservation due to accelerated ecosystem transformations and the territorial planning required for peacemaking. A recent article explains how the authors conducted a systematic review of 470 documents published between 1990 and 2015 to evaluate the progress of biodiversity and ecosystem services knowledge, identify biases, and define the priorities for research.
They concluded “In the short term, the establishment of protected areas to guarantee the supply of ecosystem services for human well-being, in the middle term, an integrated territorial planning,” said the scientists in their article. “And in the long term, the promotion of the social-ecological systems perspective. Ecosystem services concept reveals the link between biodiversity and human well-being and thus could have the potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation and peace construction in the Caribbean.”
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Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Knowledge in the Colombian Caribbean
Progress and Challenges
Juanita Aldana-Domínguez1, 2, Carlos Montes1, María Martínez2, Nicolás Medina3, Joachim Hahn2, Maritza Duque2
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
“The upper altitude ecosystems of the Andes are among the most threatened by climate change. Computer models suggest that a large percentage of species in these ecosystems will be at risk of extinction and that avian communities will suffer disruption and impoverishment,” explained a group of scientists in a new article(1) recently published on the Journal of Field Ornithology.
As their abstract describes studies in other Andean countries lend some support to these predictions, but there are no quantitative data from Colombia appropriate to test these models. In 1991–1992. They we conducted a bird survey in a high Andean cloud forest to gather information about the species present and their abundance, attempting to replicate this earlier study 24 yr later to detect any changes in the avifauna and determine possible causes for those changes.
The team supplemented their observational data by also capturing birds in mist-nets. Community species richness and composition as well as the overall abundance of birds changed little from 1991–1992 to 2015–2016, but nearly 30% of bird species changed in abundance. Changes in the presence or abundance of nine or 10 species reflected upward shifts in elevational limits potentially due to climate change.
The authors recommended the establishment of a monitoring program in Colombia because data obtained from such a program might be important in designing measures to mitigate the effects of climate change and conserve biodiversity.
Photo Tanager Finch © Juan Jose Arango / VWPics
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Birding
Birdwatching in Colombia
A Guide to the Birds of Colombia
Travel
Moon Colombia (Travel Guide)
47 Amazing Things to See and Do in Colombia
Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide)
Colombia (National Geographic Adventure Map)
National Geographic Traveler: Colombia, 2nd Edition
Changing Markets: Medicinal Plant Ethnobotany in the Andes of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia
by KIKE CALVO
This post is the latest in the series Uncover Diverse Colombia by Colombia Photo Expeditions, in which Kike Calvo profiles interesting information, research and thoughts on Colombia for journalism, ecotourism, science, exploration and photography.
As a result of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany celebrated in Braganca (Portugal) during June 4-9 of June 2017, the book “ Living in a global world: ethnobotany, local knowledge and sustainability.” was produced. The program included “Changing markets: medicinal plant ethnobotany in the Andes of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia” by Authors: Paniagua-Zambrana, Narel Y. [1], Bussmann, Rainer W [2], Hart, Robbie E [3], Romero, Carolina [2], Moya Huanca, Araseli Laura [1].
Given the importance of local markets as a source of medicinal plants for both healers and the population, literature on market flows and the value of the plant material traded is rather scarce. This stands in contrast to wealth of available information for other com- ponents of Andean ethnobotany. The present study attempts to remedy this situation by providing a detailed inventory of medicinal plant markets in the La Paz-El Alto (Bolivia); Lima, Trujillo and Chiclayo (Peru) and Bogota (Colombia). Both species composition, and medicinal applications, have changed considerably over time. From 2001-2015, semi– structured interviews were conducted with hundreds of plant vendors in order to elucidate more details on plant usage and provenance. The results of the present study were then compared to previous inventories of medicinal plants in the region, as much as available, to elucidate changes over time and impact of interview techniques. Over the years we we encountered and documented over 800 plant species. This indicates a great wealth of ethnobotanical knowledge in the Andean region of South America. All markets show a considerable change over the last few decades, with new species being introduced into the market chain, and other species being replaced. In course of the present study it became apparent that even well known species might often be replaced by other ap- parently similar but botanically unrelated species due to environmental and market forces The present data indicate that, while the floristic composition of often remained relatively constant over the last decades, the number of indications for which certain species were used increased tremendously, and that profound differences exist even between markets in close proximity. The dramatic increase in previously not used species used per indica- tion might pose serious risks for consumers. We found serious problems due to species replacements. Even plants that have a well established vernacular name, and are easily recognizable botanically, can be replaced by other species that can pose a serious health risk. Vendor education and stringent identification of the material sold in public markets are clearly needed.
1 – Universidad Nacional de San Andres, Herbario Nacional de Bolivia, Cota Cota, La Paz, Murillo, Bolivia; 2 – Missouri Botanical Garden, WLBC, PO Box 299, Saint Louis, Missouri, 63166-0299, United States; 3 – Missouri Botanical Garden, WLBC, P. O. Box 299, Saint Louis, MO, 63166-0299, United States
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Learn More:
Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
Herbal Medicine Natural Remedies: 150 Herbal Remedies to Heal Common Ailments
Photo: Botanical Garden of the Pacific. Mecana River Nature Reserve. Bahia Solano, Choco, Colombia. © Kike Calvo
