Tropical Adventure, take 2

In less than 2 days, the OTS graduate course in tropical biology will begin. I will spend the next six weeks with a group of very motivated grad students and an impressive group of invited faculty, traveling all over Costa Rica to teach this course. We will learn statistics, research design, R, video and audio production, natural history, and we will do field research projects that address cool questions about how these tropical ecosystems work. We will work with bats, frogs, plants, microbes, ants, caterpillars, just to name a few organisms. We will use ecological niche modeling approaches to understand the drivers of salamander declines in high elevation forests and using those same approaches, come up with some predictions for future salamander distributions. We will dig into the past to see how these forests have changed, using meta-analysis approaches and harnessing >40 years of OTS graduate course books and countless OTS students' projects. All this work will also be very fun and exciting and in the end, I have yet to meet a student who isn't transformed and invigorated by the experience of the OTS grad course. So thrilling to be a part of this experience and to share in it with the students. Less than 2 days!