Most tropical trees form root associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. However, extensive patches of montane and premontane forest in Panama contain a small number of tree species in the oak and walnut families that instead associate with ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. Many of these...
Concern for the state of the marine environment is particularly acute among coral reefs that have been impacted by widespread fishing, pollution, and global warming. Yet coral reef ecology as a discipline is barely 50 years old, meaning the majority of data collected to understand levels of reef...
Plant leaves show us the species that exist in a forest, and the ecological conditions in which they live. These attributes can also be observed in fossil leaves, which allows us to reconstruct forests that existed millions of years ago and understand how they have changed over time. In this...
Scientists, students and communicators from Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Spain will spend twelve days on the high seas exploring the biodiversity of Panama’s Cordillera de Coiba seamounts.
Conservation and sustainable management projects need to be able to monitor their progress – or lack thereof – in a timely and rigorous way that is scalable: increasing biodiversity with forest regeneration in Indonesia should be possible to measure with the same indicator as in Myanmar....
Plant leaves show us the species that exist in a forest, and the ecological conditions in which they live. These attributes can also be observed in fossil leaves, which allows us to reconstruct forests that existed millions of years ago and understand how they have changed over time. In this talk we will talk about how fossil leaves tell us about the effect of a mass extinction 66 million years ago, on the evolution of modern tropical forests.
Most ocean life remains to be discovered. Because fish and many other animals that live in the ocean often have larvae or other, microscopic life stages that drift freely in ocean water, counting species by genetic barcoding of plankton samples adds to counts of species recorded as adults and is a highly efficient way to understand what lives in the ocean and how biodiversity changes as we modify the ocean environment.
The Secretary visited facilites in Panama and Colon and got to see first-hand the important science being done at STRI.
