Maria Laura Tolmos Coquelet grew up in the Peruvian Amazon. As a child, she explored rivers by kayak and looked for animals along the banks. Nature was not a distant idea to her. It was home, and it shaped the course of her life. Tolmos, who died of breast cancer on June 21st in Barcelona, aged 37, became a forest scientist because the forest had never been remote to her. She studied forest sciences in Peru, then went to Germany for a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in forest sciences and forest ecology at the University of Göttingen, which she completed in 2024. Her research examined patterns of plant and tree diversity across islands, island-like ecosystems, mountains, and tropical landscapes. She studied different dimensions of biodiversity, from taxonomy to evolutionary history to function, and the environmental gradients that shape them. Her science was exacting because its source was personal. Deforestation, pollution, and the overuse of natural resources were pressures she had seen in places she knew. At Wilderness International, where she served as co-director of science and sat on the board of Wilderness International Perú, she helped turn concern into method: field knowledge, ecological assessment, institutional trust, and long-term protection. Alongside her husband, Fabian Mühlberger, and others, she helped create the team that founded Wilderness International Perú in 2019. María Laura Tolmos. From her social media. She was, colleagues said, a stickler for detail in the best sense. She wanted clean data, robust methods, and answers that could withstand…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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