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.
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AuthorI am an ecology PhD student in the Beaudrot Lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Archives
November 2023
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