Infrastructure Improvements to Enhance Research at the La Selva Biological Station

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This award provides support for improvement of the physical infrastructure of the La Selva station of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a nonprofit consortium of 56 universities and research institutions from the United States, Costa Rica and Australia. La Selva encompasses 1,536 hectares of classic lowland tropical rain forest in northeastern Costa Rica, a country renowned for its outstanding national system of conservation areas. The station is the largest of three biological field stations operated by OTS in Costa Rica, the others being Las Cruces (mid-elevation cloud forest near Panama) and Palo Verde (lowland monsoonally-dry forest in Guanacaste Province). At these sites OTS works in cooperation with governmental and partner-organizations on scientific issues of training, conservation, environmental education, and natural resource management.Over its 46-year history, La Selva has hosted 3,000 research projects, resulting in over 2,000 scientific publications and 160 theses and dissertations. Visitation has reached 25,000 person-days a year, with education use by 3,000 students and faculty in 1999. After a decade of increasing usage, La Selva's housing and trail system are inadequate to meet the physical demands of this level of use. This award will support plans to permanently address the issue of inadequate housing for researchers, degraded trails in the old-growth forest and a deteriorating laboratory at the station. This assistance will enable La Selva to continue to be a center of excellence for research and training in tropical ecology during the decade ahead.