Hi all! As the fall semester comes near the end, I was able to visit my summer intern Patricia's classroom. What an amazing experience with some awesome kiddos. We learned about food webs by coloring jenga pieces with plants and animals and labeling them as primary producers, primary consumers, apex predators, or decomposers. We then removed species to see how the rest of the food web responded, and the results of losing too many species (ecosystem/jenga collapse!). Enjoy photos below, as all students parents signed a photo release form.
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It has been a busy summer of travel! I recently returned from a trip to Kigali, Rwanda for the International Congress for Conservation Biology, and travelled to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda to go gorilla trekking and Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. Both of these locations are study sites in my project so it was amazing to see them in person! I also traveled to Portland, Oregon USA for the conference for Ecological Society of America. Presenting my work, meeting new ecologists, and seeing gorgeous places; an awesome summer indeed!
Hello again! This summer I had the awesome experience of working with Patricia, an elementary school teacher, and having her help me with my field work research. She was my intern as a part of Rice's Research Experience for Teachers program (RET). We worked on analyzing species from the photos from the camera traps in Costa Rica. Patricia teaches in both English and Spanish, so we were able to practice Spanish together too! She was curious, determined, and overall an amazing human!!! Thanks for working with me :-) I am hoping to visit Patricia's classroom this fall to give a lesson about my work.
After almost two months in the rainforest, it is time to return to Texas. I am proud to say this was a successful field season. I walked on nearly every trail in the reserve, successfully deploying my camera traps and acoustic recorders and taking vegetation measurements at all sites. Overall, I have nearly 8,000 wildlife photos and over 800 hours of recordings. Thankfully I am able to use various programs to help me automatically identify species in my data. After I know which species were found at which site, I can create food webs weighted by the occupancy of each species, and compare these webs across the differing vegetation and forest types of each site to look for patterns. This work will help us understand how disturbance to a forest impacts the species interactions and ecosystem functioning. By understanding these impacts, we can predict how future human-induced changes to landscapes can impacts species and use this knowledge in conservation planning decisions. A fun side project that I was able to work on involved putting one of my spare cameras beneath one of the bridges at the station. The scientists who work here told me that an ocelot likes to go under the bridge to go to the bathroom (you can certainly smell it after it does). Four years ago they documented a few ocelots near the bridge and wanted to see if we could see them again, and we did! The individual above has the same markings as an ocelot captured in photos four years ago. He has been peeing in the exact same spot for over four years. Pretty crazy, and also great information for the station to keep tabs on the wildlife here. I cannot thank my field assistant Randall enough. He is actually going to be working on another camera trap project with another researcher after I leave. I know he will be amazing in that role too and I look forward to seeing the results from that work in the future! I cannot put into words how grateful I am for everyone I have met during my field season. It would have been impossible without them, and I am especially thankful for their patience with my Spanish. Thank you to La Selva and OTS for keeping me safe, fed, housed, and supported in more ways than I can count. I was truly blessed to do my work in such an amazing place with fantastic and brilliant people. And of course, thank you to the forest for allowing me to conduct my work and giving the space for me to find so much peace and joy. As I leave there is a group of graduate students coming in for an OTS field course. If you are interested in this or something similar, you can find more about it on OTS website! They have both undergraduate and graduate programs, and programs conducted in English and Spanish. Time to head back to more heat and humidity in Houston! I am sad to leave but happy to return to my community at Rice as well. This summer I will have an elementary school teacher as an intern and she will help me go through my field work data. Stay tuned for more results and to hear more about this awesome opportunity for collaboration with a teacher this summer! Hasta luego Costa Rica and thank you for an amazing field season.
Now comes another fifteen days of data collection (fingers crossed our cameras capture some more great images), which means fifteen days to explore, do some other graduate school work, and continue organizing the data I collected so far. But emphasis on the explore part! I worked on a different project in Costa Rica last year and became friends with another ecologist who is from and lives here in Costa Rica. During a few of my free days, I visited them in San José to learn more about Costa Rican culture. Our first stop was Refugio de Vida Silvestre Cerro Dantas for a hike. This is a wildlife refuge that is busy every weekend with hikers, bikers, and local outdoor enthusiasts. The reserve is actually on the other side of a large volcano from my field station! We made some adorable friends from our hike. They followed for 12km! We stopped for some rest at the "magic bus", an abandoned bus with unknown origin, and headed back down. And don't fret, my friend and I gave some yummy treats to our new friends at the end. We then headed off to get a sweet treat, granizados, which is shaved ice with fruit and syrup, powdered milk, condensed milk. Quite sweet but so delicious. We had ours with ice cream which is the traditional way of the "Churchill" copo from the Puntarenas region of Costa Rica. We also went to the market for some empanadas arregladas filled with cheese and topped with cabbage and some sauces. The market was also full of fruit, meat, fish, spices, and artisan goods and I actually bought a chorreador, which is a traditional coffee maker using fabric to hold the ground beans and pouring water into the fabric. It always makes great coffee! I learned about Costa Rican history at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica in San José. The military was abolished here in 1948, and the museum building is the former Bellavista Military Barracks. The museum begins by walking through a butterfly garden filled with gorgeous species and facts about them all. Throughout the museum is then different exhibits about the economic, political, and cultural history of Costa Rica. My favorite was an art exhibit using glass sculptures inspired by nature. The museum is also next to the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica, where congress meets, so it was cool to see that building too! The steps outside were also busy with people dancing, chatting, and playing music so it was just an awesome place to be. And I learned so much!
I went on another hike as well, en el cerro Guarari. This hike went through coffee plantations and farmland, as well as some higher elevation forest. It was really gorgeous and is near Volcan Barva, a volcano that is visited by many people. As we walked back down a road after reaching the peak (in pouring rain), we stopped at a restaurant for another traditional meal, Casado which is beans, rice, plantains, meat, and salad.
Just a few more days until the final photos are in! Check back for my final update from this field season soon.
Time flies! My first set of camera and recorder deployments are ready to be picked up after 15 days. I am very excited to see the results. I will have a total of 30 sites (15 in old growth forest and 15 in regenerating forest), but I only have 15 camera traps and recorders as they are expensive. Therefore I split my sites into two rounds of deployment, with some from each forest type in each round to avoid any bias caused by weather or other conditions that impact one of the rounds. I will also account for these potential issues later in my analyses. As for this first round, we got some awesome images!
We have thousands of images and recordings now, and will continue to gather more still. It is lot logistically ideal to go through each photo or audio file by hand, so I will be using two AI software tools, both of which are free to the public! For photos, I will be using Wildlife Insights and for audio recordings I will use Arbimon. Both of these websites allow users to upload their data and use AI trained on previous data to identify animals. This saves an immense amount of time for researchers as well as allows data to easily be shared with other scientists. I am also using sites from a previous camera trapping expedition by a network of scientists with sites across the globe. I am hoping to visit and work in other sites in this network during my PhD! We also continue to see amazing plants, animals, and views everywhere we walk. 15 more days and our second round of results will be ready to collect.
While I wait for my camera traps and acoustic recorders to collect data, I am taking this time to reach out to various community members here to learn about Costa Rica. Ecotourism (tourism centered around natural environments) is very popular in Costa Rica, and a important part of its economy. Costa Rica is also a leader in sustainability and with pioneering policies. I decided to learn more about these green practices by visiting a nearby nature reserve, Lapa Verde (which means "green macaw" in Spanish). Established in 2013, this reserve hosts scientists, school groups, and more while also partaking in reforestation and protection measures. This reserve is also part of the crucial biological corridor San Juan-La Selva, which provides continous habitat for species movement. On the day I visited, there was a school group from the USA that had come to be "scientists for a day". Managers of the reserve walked us all through the forest, with students learning how to use camera traps, mark vegetation, and observe the natural world. During my visit, I learned some different camera trap techniques and showed the managers the AI powered website I am using to analyze images. They also showed me some beautiful images from their camera trapping efforts, and we visited the canopy tower, which was gorgeous. After compleition of my project, I will be sharing my camera trap images with them as well, as my field site is in close proximity to the reserve and these photos can be useful for monitoring species at Lapa Verde too. They are always looking for collaborators and visitors, so reach out if you are interested! A few days later, I visited Costa Rica Best Chocolate. This is an organization that emphasizes conservation through tourism, not tourism about conservation. The goals of their work are to teach others about nature and how we must protect it. Rodolfo was my guide and described the history and mission of his work. His father worked at La Selva (the research station I am staying at) when it first began. Rodolfo was a guide at La Selva and learned about conservation through this work and his family, as well as learned the importance of conservation for the people of his community. When I met Rodolfo, we began by first entering the rainforest and placing our hands on a tree. Out loud, we thanked the forest for this visit and took some deep breaths. Rodolfo explained that this is a practice he does whenever entering the forest. He spoke about how sometimes when you walk through a forest and then turn around, it can feel like the forest is pushing you out. You might be familiar with this off feeling from any hike or walk you have done, as I certainly had felt it before. But Rodolfo said once he began to acknowledge and thank the forest, he has never felt this pressure to leave, and I never felt it that day either. We continued to walk through the property as he explained his organization's role in the community. He buys land that would be used for pineapple plantations and gives job opportunities to the previous land owners to grow cacao. He told me several stories in which he helped community members, such as an artisian with a broken oven and therefore inability to work, for no cost. Rodolfo says he knew things will work out in the end, and looks out for the community. He spoke about how people in his community often hear the phrase "climate change" and think of the icebergs far away, and do not realize the impacts close to home as well. Rodolfo's mission is to bring this knowledge to locals and to anyone who visits. He does this through teaching about cacao. He walked me through each step from harvesting, fermenting, drying, grinding, and we tried a little bit of each stage as we went. He emphasized how it was this process that really delivered the knowledge he wanted, as it was through sharing this food that we connected, becoming friends and understanding each other a bit more. I was very grateful for Rodolfo and the experience. It was intimate but at the same time welcoming. At the end of the tour, there is a gift shop with wood work and jewelry from local artists and chocolate bars and bits to help support Costa Rica Best Chocolate. Of course I bought as many chocolates as I could, as well as a small sloth that was too cute to pass up.
I am truly fortunate to be able to work here and meet amazing naturalists, leaders, and people. The photos and results of my project will be shared with La Selva to use for grants and/or educational purposes. My hope is that by openly sharing all my data and planning, future students and/or researchers can build off of my work and seek out their own questions, just as I did with the work of previous scientists. There is very much a feeling of "science together" here, and I think that is a crucial approach for successful investigations and connections with the landscape, and more importantly, the people.
Hello, and welcome back! I have been for about a week and have been exploring the station and forest. The area is beautiful, the food is great, and I have a lovely view from my lab room! I spent the first few days planning where to put my camera traps and acoustic recorders. I will be placing 15 cameras and 15 recorders (as pairs) in various parts of the forest that are either old growth forest or forest that has regenerated after a period of disturbance. Over the course of 15 days, this equipment will gather data on species occurrence. I want to investigate what areas of the forest support which species interactions. By looking at species occurrence in different areas, I can give probabilities that two species (one predator and one prey) may come into contact and interac (predation). If areas with less vegetation have fewer occurrences of species, then these important species interactions, which support the health of the ecosystem, may not be happening. As deforestation and habitat loss continues in forests across the world, understanding the impacts of human driven changes is crucial when designing conservation strategies.
After vegetation measurements, we installed the camera traps and acoustic recorders. Camera traps work by detecting movement as well as infrared radiation (heat), taking photos of the animal (or sometimes a human by accident, but all photos of humans are anonymously deleted). Acoustic recorders run for 5 minutes at the beggining of every hour to record the sounds of the forest. These techniques are less labor intensive than taking data by hand, however they generate a lot of data. Therefore, I will be using AI software to assist in identifying species in photos and recordings. I will talk more about that in the future. After walking quite a few kilometers in the forest, we finished deploying our equipment for these 15 sites, and now we wait. During our walks in the forest, we saw some pretty cool sites so far! Check back for the first round of results in a couple weeks!
Hi all! Welcome to my blog :-) I hope to share some updates as move along in my PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the many adventures along the way. The year started driving from Los Angeles to Houston, sweating profusely along the way, from heat and nervousness. And now looking back, I am so thankful for my department and Rice for welcoming me. I spent much of the year planning for a field season and applying to grants, and could not have done so without the help and encouragement of my colleagues. And now the time has come to head off for fieldwork! Special thanks to the Expanding Horizons Fellowship and the Lewis and Clark Grant for Exploration and Field Research for allowing me to partake in my field season.
For my first field season, I have traveled to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí, Costa Rica, to La Selva Field Station. Just a 3.5 hour flight from Houston and 2 hour drive from San José. The field station is managed by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS or OET in Spanish). This organization was immensely helpful planning my field season, and provided support the moment I arrived. La Selva was founded in 1968, with Old Growth Forest, as well as other areas in various stages of regeneration, with the reserve sharing a border with Braulio Carrillo National Park. This location therefore offers an ideal area to look at the role of disturbance and regeneration on species interactions. I will be using camera traps and acoustic recorders in different areas of the forest to gather occurrence data for species. I will also take vegetation measurements using a mixed reality device (read more here) to try and understand how much vegetation influences where species visit in a forest. I will have approximately 30 sites across the forest and my field assistant and I will be doing lots of walking. Tomorrow is our first day of deploying equipment, so stay tuned to see how it goes! Hasta luego. |
AuthorI am an ecology PhD student in the Beaudrot Lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Archives
November 2023
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