Tropical Field Ecology

Catalog description

A research-intensive, active learning course taught entirely in Costa Rica during the winter break. Students depart from wherever they are and rendezvous in Costa Rica, with detailed plans and contingencies in the event of problems with flights. We work at rustic but comfortable (beds, meals, indoor plumbing) field stations where we have immediate access to pristine habitats where we perform faculty and student-designed research projects. These research projects involve collaborative design, data collection of data to test specific hypotheses, data analyses, oral presentation, and writing formal journal-style reports. Faculty present evening lectures comprising background and examples that connect finished work to these nascent projects. Main field sites comprise a pre-montane moist forest on the Atlantic slope and a lowland rainforest on the Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula. Course objectives are diverse, including i) provide an opportunity for students to gain confidence traveling to a non-english speaking country, independently of family but supported by faculty, peers, and our in-country partners; ii) learn how to perform research in a setting where learning methodology is deemphasized while intellectual engagement and ownership are maximized, iii) experience and learn about a broad sweep of natural history and ecology of the neotropics.