About the trip

ENVIRON 217. Tropical Ecology: Ecosystem, community, and population ecology of tropical plants and animals with application to conservation and sustainable development.

On the field component of this course, we arrive and go straight to Palo Verde National Park 3 nights (2 days),- dry tropical Pacific forest-(actually a much more rare and threatened forest type than rain forests) there is a big wetland/estuary there that connects with the pacific-  we will take a boat trip to see the estuary, as well as take walks exploring bird life, and perhaps a night walk to search for scorpians with black lights (they glow!)  then we travel east- and stop for the night at the Arenal Volcano- there we will take a night tour of the volcano and also tour a huge hydro electric plant. next day onto La Selva- tropical rain forest- with an elevational gradient- at the tip of Braulio Carrillo National Park. At La Selva we'll spend the majority of our time- we have activities planned- a local expert on birds and biodiversity information will be coming from San Jose to take us on a bird walk and give a lecture, hopefully we'll be doing some mist netting at night of bats (still looking into that), and we'll be doing some field measurements ourselves of species richness and biomass. We will also be taking some day trips to sustainable pinapple and banana plantations, visiting FUNDECOR, and environmental NGO, and have a visit to INBIO parque on the way back to San Jose.