Greetings from East Africa!! We are back in Kenya for another month-long UW Tacoma study abroad course - this year I am once again here with Dr. Jim Gawel, and we have ten students from the UW Tacoma and Seattle campuses with us...everyone has come in from the long two-day air trip (via Amsterdam) and are settled in at the Green Belt Movement's (GBM) facilitieis in Lang'ata, outside of Nairobi. Tomorrow is a packed day - orientation, including an overview of the various projects that GBM (brainchild of Nobel prize winnter Wangari Maathi, who recently passed away), a visit to a local giraffe sanctuary, and some lectures on Kenyan economics/politics from faculty from nearby Kenyatta University. We're also be preparing to spend some time in the one of the Green Belt Movement communities, with the Chuka up on the eastern slopes of Mt. Kenya. More later - now everyone must get some rest!

Back in Mastatal after a week on the coast!

Hola! We are back in the farming village of Mastatal, Costa Rica after a whirlwind visit to the Pacific coast. We spent some days at Hacienda Baru, a private nature reserve near Dominical, where the class explored the mangroves and other coastal habitats with staff naturalists. We also spent time with naturalists in Manuel Antonio Natural Park as well as some mangrove islands further north - all teeming with monkeys, sloths, and other wildlife. Finally, we had the opportunity to participate in night beach patrols, looking for nesting sea turtles - several groups had the good fortune of witnessing the ancient ritual of Olive Ridleys crawling up onto the beach in the dead of night and laying their eggs!

Students are busy wrapping up their research projects - they'll be giving final presentations tomorrow afternoon in the outdoor classroom here at Rancho Mastatal - then it will be back to the San Jose area to return home and/or continue travels elsewhere!

Greetings from Mastatal!

Hello from Costa Rica! Erica Cline and I are in a rural farming village in Costa Rica with 13 students on a UW Tacoma study-abroad course. We left the San Jose area a few days ago, and all are now immersed in life in a remote village, with students fully engaged in their independent research projects, which form the core of this study abroad experience. Projects span a range of mostly ecological studies, including exploring the effects of roads and landscape use on stream macroinvertebrate biodiversity and sediments, poison dart frog behavior, hummingbird foraging, butterfly diversity, fungal pathogen dynamics in cacao plantations, and the antibiotic properties of medicinal plants found here in the rainforest. The group will be here for another week or so before heading to the coast to explore mangrove and other habitats there, before returning back to the village. More posts and updates to come!

Back in Watamu

Greetings from the Kenyan coast – I’m here for a few weeks at the Mwamba Field Study Centre (A Rocha Kenya) working with colleagues on several different conservation projects. I’m continuing work on a collaborative project with Colin Jackson, an ornithologist at A Rocha Kenya, and his field crew on conservation of several endangered bird species that inhabit the nearby Arabuko-Sokoke Forest (ASF). ASF is the largest last remnant forest along the East African coast, and is home to six birds on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (or the IUCN as it’s known) “red list” of endangered/threatened species. Last year we published the results of a study we conducted (with UW Tacoma undergraduates) exploring the interaction of bird and arthropod populations with elephant disturbance; this month we have just submitted another paper (again with the help of UW Tacoma undergraduates who accompanied me here last autumn to do more fieldwork) detailing the preference of one of the red-listed birds (the East Coast Akalat – Sheppardia gunning) for a particular habitat in the forest (Cynometra forest & thicket). We’re in the process of writing up another paper this week that attempts to more closely analyze data linking the relationship between elephant disturbance and other vegetation characteristics and bird diversity in the forest reserve. Plans to conduct an exhaustive elephant count, in conjunction with the Kenya Wildlife Service, have been delayed for a few weeks – we’re hopeful that this will get done within the month so that we’ll have updated information about the elephant densities in ASF, which will help us all to better understand the rich ecological network involving these megaherbivores and the rest of the forest denizens (and consequently the implications of different management strategies).
On the marine side, I’ve been continuing my collaboration with Watamu Turtle Watch, finishing up analysis of data linking beach habitat condition and Chelonia mydas (green sea turtle) nesting along Watamu Beach. We should have a preliminary paper submitted on this work in the next two months – more info to follow!

Earthwatch Team Two 2011 wraps up

We wrapped up another week of fieldwork in Tarrazú with the second Earthwatch team of the season. With the usual flurry of activities, the small (only four!) team was invaluable in helping set up traps, collecting insects from the field, and sorting specimens in the lab. Last week we took some time to move our entire operation to a new (but nearby) site - we're now fully installed in a new laboratory facility - an old house that we're leasing from the coffee cooperative. All are very happy to be away from the car emissions testing facility that had been located just outside the doors/windows of our old lab facilities!

This morning we found ourselves in the middle of the San Isidro Blessing of the Animals (& crops) in Santa Maria - droves of people came down from the surrounding hills with their dogs, cows, horses, ducks, etc. in tow for the festivities - a great way to finish off the week!

Fieldwork in Tarrazú

I'm spending a few weeks in the central highlands of Costa Rica, conducting research in an ongoing project I'm conducting with Earthwatch Institute and a local coffee farmers cooperative (CoopeTarrazu). The focus this year is on pollinators, and especially on the importance of nearby forest fragments on coffee yields and the abundance and diversity of bees visiting coffee. Fieldwork activities include sampling bee/wasp diversity and abundance in and around coffee fields, and manipulating pollinator access to flowers in order to compare the effects of wind vs. insect pollination on yields. This week, I've got a group of volunteers from the global firm Ernst & Yield helping out in the field- we're spending the mornings putting up insect traps in coffee fields and nearby forests, and the afternoons in the lab sorting the insects captured from the previous days' traps. The volunteers (ten of them) are also working with the local coffee cooperative in an effort to help them develop their social corporate responsibility protocols. The group will be here a total of eight days; another group of volunteers arrives this weekend, and we'll continue collecting data on more farms throughout next week.

Wrap-up in Watamu – dung counts, poachers, and a continuing conflict

We wrapped up fieldwork in Watamu this week, capturing some more birds and collecting their fecal pellets, as well as trapping more arthropods. The fecal pellets have been sent to a forensics lab in Nairobi, where they will be scanned for DNA signatures of different types of insects, so that we can determine the composition of the diets of the birtds (and hence focus our data collection and conservation efforts on those species). We also finished recording turtle nesting habitat data along a 4km stretch of the beach; these data will be combined with similar surveys done throughout this year, so we can discern any patterns between beach condition and turtle nesting frequency.
On our last evening in Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, we did an elephant count data collection practice run. This consists basically of walking along a linear transect, noting any elephant dung piles nearby, and measuring both their distance from the transect as well as their stage of decomposition (from fresh to disintegrated). We’re setting our sights on doing a full comprehensive count in the spring, during the rainy season.
On our way into the forest, we learned that one of the rangers had had a near-fatal encounter with a poisoned elephant trap put in the forest by a poacher. This trap consisted of a sharp knife embedded in a log; the knife had been coated with a concentrated toxic paste of toxins that had been extracted from a local tree. The trap had been laid near a group of downed logs, so that passing elephants might not see it and step on it, injecting the poison into their foot. The poachers are interested in the tusks of the elephant; sadly, the black market for ivory in Africa continues to thrive despite a bevy of national and international restrictions/regulations. The ranger had accidentally stepped on the trap, but miraculously, had been spared because the poison had rubbed off onto his rubber boots before it was able to enter his bloodstream. He is still in recovery; meanwhile, the rangers are redoubling their efforts to find the poachers. This conflict between livelihoods and conservation continues to rage both here and across the globe – conservation biologists are finally starting to focus more on providing alternate sources of incomes for local peoples who historically have depended on hunting and other forms of extraction of biodiversity – but it may be too little, too late in many areas. For our part, continuing to unravel the mystery of how best to foster biodiversity in reserves like Arabuko-Sokoke may be some small help – the more that is known about the wildlife/biodiversity there, the more visitors to the area may include a forest visit in their beach-going itinerary – and hence the more revenues the Forest Service will receive for ongoing conservation efforts. The real trick is to tie things together so that locals (especially the residents of the 50+ villages that ring the reserve) also receive direct benefits from this cascade – and also begin to take more interest in sustainable forest stewardship.
For now, it’s kwaheri to Kenya – until next time!