Urgent equipment requirements to continue long-term research program on tropical food webs

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Tropical rainforests contain a large fraction of the world's biodiversity, but are under a range of anthropogenic threats, such as land use change and climate change. Conversion of forests to other land uses, such as agriculture, often results in fragmentation of the original continuous forest into small patches of forest. My research program in the rainforests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, has examined how forest fragmentation and changes in rainfall patterns affect food webs the networks of predator-prey interactions that connect species. We have discovered that both forest fragmentation and reduced rainfall affect the top predators in invertebrate food webs, initiating a cascade of changes in other species and affecting how quickly nutrients and carbon cycle through the ecosystem. However, fragmentation and climate change are occurring simultaneously, and it is therefore critical to know if their combined effects are different from their individual effects. We are on the cusp of answering this important question in my Costa Rican research, but my research program is threatened by impending loss of vital field equipment and personnel. Our studies of fragmentation require us travel over a 13km x 13km area of landscape, yet our two field vehicles have reached the end of their life and require immediate replacement. Monitoring of climatological variables, such as temperature and rainfall, is an essential part of our research on effects of climate change, but changes in park policies mean that park rangers are no longer able to manually recorded rainfall. Instead, we urgently need to switch to an automated weather station, and to extend this monitoring over the landscape with microclimate sensors. Failure to address these equipment priorities will effectively shut down my research program. This would have consequences for the training of the many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and undergraduates who take part in this research, and would prevent us from understanding and communicating the threats faced by this biologically important area of the world.