L'épopée de l'Institut International de Recherches du Serengeti à Seronera (Tanzanie)

Initiated in the late fifties by the Grzimeks, the biological exploration of the Serengeti really started with decisions taken at the Arusha Conference in 1960. Isolated initiatives soon fused in a coordinated program under the heading of the International Serengeti Research Institute ; a field station was created at Seronera and was at work in I 968. It benefited financial support from a lot of national and international organizations and scientific coorporation from outside universities. For two decades, research at Seronera was an outstanding example of a collective effort, resulting in a mass of data on the ecology, behaviour, social structure, and populations of wildlife, along with a long term ecological monitoring program on climate and vegetation fluctuations. Goals, methods and results have been presented by Sinclair and Northon-Griffiths in their 1979 book, which is analyzed here. These data clarified relations between the main components of the ecosystem and allowed predictions on the future of herbivore populations and forest caver. The most prevalent conclusion is that such an ecosystem is constantly moving from a stale of equilibrium towards another, so that management decisions - culling of elephants or predators - should be regarded as arbitrary perturbations preventing the ecosystems to reach the desirable equilibrium compatible with conditions prevailing at the moment. In fact, unraveling an ecosystem needs researches covering lime and space scales largely outside our own life-span and perceptions. Meanwhile, the monitoring program came to an end in 1978 by lack of funding following the first petroleum crisis; researchers emigrated or went back home and authorities became more suspicious. It might have been the end of the story. Fortunately, some researches were reinitiated during the eighties ; not enough to bridge with the previous ones and to maintain the continuity of the effort, but enough to restore some hope; their story is still to be done. Our present priority is to try to understand the reasons of the lost of confidence between researchers and authorities which broke out at a Lime when the Seronera program was still at full work. In fact, their priorities were quite different : pure research against coverage of immediate needs. The main challenge for the community of conversationalists is therefore to imagine a new style of cooperation integrating national pride, coverage of costs, meddling and control rights, training, guaranties for continuity, and development.