Panguana by 2000 had grown from its original footprint. Juliane has expanded it significantly, from approximately 460 acres to what the Wikipedia record describes as almost 10 square kilometers of primary tropical rainforest — a substantially larger private conservation area. In 2011, the Peruvian Ministry of Environment declared Panguana a private conservation area, a legal status that protects it from clearing, hunting, and colonization. The station that Maria and Hans-Wilhelm had established as a five-year research project had become a permanent protected forest.
The research conducted at Panguana since its founding is extensive: more than 180 scientific publications, numerous diploma and doctoral studies, and international expeditions that have contributed to the documentation of the extraordinary biodiversity of that specific patch of Peruvian lowland rainforest. The station is located in a part of Peru that is under significant pressure from deforestation, mining, and development. The legal protection of Panguana in 2011 was not a foregone conclusion; it required advocacy and documentation and the kind of sustained scientific credibility that Juliane and her late parents had built across decades.
She works at the Zoological State Collection in Munich and runs Panguana. The two institutions — the European research collection and the South American field station — are connected through her and through a cooperation established between the Zoological State Collection and the Natural History Museum in Lima in 2003. When she is away, a station manager named Moro acts in her absence.
This is conservation work. It is slow work and institutional work and work whose fruits are measured in decades of protected habitat and published scientific data rather than in dramatic moments. It is also, in the most direct possible way, the continuation of what Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke began — a scientific engagement with the specific forest of the Río Yuyapichis drainage that has now spanned, through the founding generation and their daughter, more than fifty years.