LEWISTON – A researcher for National Geographic will be at Bates College Friday to talk about her work with mountain gorillas in Uganda.

Michele Goldsmith has been studying the impact of ecotourism on gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park since 1999. The title of the lecture she will present at Bates is “Gorilla Conservation: Is Ecotourism the Answer?”

Co-director of the Great Ape World Heritage Species Project, an international initiative to protect all great apes, Goldsmith has been National Geographic’s principal investigator for the gorilla project. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and featured in The Boston Globe and in television documentaries, including “Wild Things” and “National Geographic Today.”

Although primates are her main focus, Goldsmith also is interested in conservation and ethical issues.

“I will be discussing the ethics of habituating great apes for ecotourism,” she said about her visit to Bates. “Ecotourism is the new panacea for conservation that might have some great benefits – especially economically – but it also is found to have quite a few costs to the animals themselves.”

The lecture is free and open to the public.