When an ecologist talks about fieldwork, what do they really mean? I’ll share a few scenes from our forest dynamics project here in Puerto Rico for you, so you can see what a full day of work looks like. We stay at a small field station in the rainforest, and wake up early to plan…

Imagine being in a skyscraper. Close the windows, and would you still be able to tell if you were on the first floor or the hundredth? Forest canopies are different – the top and bottom are entirely different world. Let’s go on a tour of Puerto Rican moist tropical forest, and climb twenty or thirty…

William Blake once wrote a poem, “The Little Girl Lost”, about two parents searching for their child through valley and desert. This week I have returned to Puerto Rico, on a much less pressing errand – the resurvey of a forest for the second year of a five-year study on forest dynamics. Last year, our…

You might imagine that the life of an ecologist is spent mostly in beautiful and remote places. While this is sometimes true, a large fraction must also be spent in front of a computer. The reason is that science is only partially about making measurements or doing experiments. These parts are the glamorous ones, insofar…