For many tropical biologists, all roads lead to Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, the most-studied piece of tropical real estate in the world. STRI Intern Omayra Meléndez shares her story about arriving on BCI and how the island is transforming her career.
Traditionally, we highlight the richness of the fauna that lives in the forests of Panama. However, the complex Panamanian forests also hide a diversity in the behavior of this fauna. Considering how small Panama is, for these same species, the behavior can vary according to its environment. In this talk we will talk about how camera traps provide us with pieces of the puzzle of the ecology and behavior of the fauna in Panama.
Understanding when and where trees die in vast tropical forests is a challenging first step toward understanding carbon dynamics and climate change. Researchers explained variations in tree mortality over a five-year period by analyzing drone images of one of the most-studied tropical forests in the world, Barro Colorado Island in Panama.
After being taught annually for three decades, the Smithsonian Introductory Field Life Sciences Course was suspended due to the pandemic, but it made a digital comeback in 2021.
Self-professed spider-fan and arachnid systematist Stephany Arizala would like more people to study this megadiverse group, so that we can do a better job of protecting them.
The longest continuous study of euglossines in the tropics found relatively stable populations of these wild bees over four decades.
