María Laura Tolmos, 37, turned a childhood in the Amazon into her life’s work

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.

She was, colleagues said, a stickler for detail in the best sense. She wanted clean data, robust methods, and answers that could withstand scrutiny. In meetings she asked why one method was being used rather than another, not to obstruct the work, but to make the work better. She was excited by canopy camera traps, environmental DNA, drone-based sensors, and the patient accumulation of species-level information. Donors, she understood, were not just giving to forests. They were trusting the evidence used to protect them.

In the field, Tolmos seemed most herself. At the Secret Forest Research Station in Tambopata, she sometimes left the dormitory bed unused, hung a hammock between two trees with Mühlberger, covered it with a tarp and mosquito net, and slept in the forest instead. She joined amphibian and reptile surveys until midnight, then rose at 5am for bird mist-netting. In truth, a colleague recalled, she barely slept there. There was too much to see.

Her husband saw the same intensity wherever they traveled. She was moved by sea cucumbers, moss, camel thorn trees, wild tigers, baby elephants, and sunrises above the canopy of the Peruvian Amazon. What others passed over, she noticed. What others admired from a distance, she studied closely. Her love of nature was not general. It had names, forms, habits, and data points.

Mühlberger remembered the first kiss they shared on June 23, 2016, “under the endless starry skies of Amazonia.” They moved in together soon after, traveled widely, and built, as he put it, “a life, a home and had a million plans.” Ten years later, on the same date, she was laid to rest.

Thirty-seven years is too little time for a life so bound to long cycles: forest growth, ecological recovery, institutional patience, the defense of places that can be lost quickly. Tolmos gave those years to work measured in generations. In Peru’s forests, and in the people now charged with studying and protecting them, something of her method remains: look closely, care seriously, and do the work before tomorrow is assumed.

Memorial at Wilderness International

Cite this article

Rhett Ayers Butler (2026). María Laura Tolmos, 37, turned a childhood in the Amazon into her life’s work. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-322527