Through the years I have maintained what I would call a modest tropical research program, focused on the New World tropics.  Recently, however, I have become involved with an interesting and ambitious large-scale conservation effort in Ecuador known as the Choco-Andean Corridor.  Briefly, the idea is to develop a corridor running from the Andean foothills to the Pacific Ocean comprised of intact forest fragments connected by areas of sustainable agriculture such as shade-grown coffee and cacao.  There are education, outreach and ecotourism components to this effort as well as research and monitoring.  The non-profit organization that spearheads this effort is the Maquipucuna Foundation, run by my colleagues and friends Rebeca Justicia and Rodrigo Ontaneda.

Our work at Macquipucuna mostly involves the development of an adaptive bird monitoring program that is state of the art but can and will be run and updated by local people.  It features monitoring done in the major land types in the region, including various types of agriculture.  We hope to be able to document an increase over time in bird abundance and richness in certain types of land use compared with others.  My lab’s tropical research has mostly involved assessing how areas such as shade grown coffee agroecosystems function relative to primary forests.  Do they contain keystone species such as army ants, and key attendant bird species?  Do birds behave the same in the different ecosystems in terms of flocking, foraging, and the like?  Overall, my research in the tropics is consistent with my interests and work in ecosystem management elsewhere.