Chris is a biologist in the Amazon. He is from California, where he studied Biology and Wildlife Management and learned about the immense biodiversity of the Tropics. After travelling and volunteering in Latin America for a year and a half, he did a masters in Conservation and Development in Latin America at the University of Florida, with a thesis on the impacts of deforestation and oil companies on Amazonian forest birds in the Cuyabeno Reserve of Ecuador. When he came back to Quito to let people know what he had found out, he was offered two jobs in conservation, without looking for them, and decided that this must be a sign that it was time to do conservation and not just talk about it, so he stayed and has helped to protect nature here for over three decades.

He did the fieldwork to help five indigenous communities in the Cuyabeno Reserve to sign cooperative agreements with the Ecuadorian national park service to define their land use rights, while assuring nature conservation.

Together with an indigenous Kichwa bird expert, Jiovanny Rivadeneyra, he measured the deepest recorded impacts on forest birds of anywhere in the world, with birds being affected kilometers into the forest mostly apparently due to the noise, in a project that was actually funded by the same oil company that was making these impacts in Yasuní National Park.
Article: Initial effects of a petroleum operation on Amazonian birds: terrestrial insectivores retreat