Understanding a rainforest by only walking through it is like visiting a new city but never leaving the tourist spots. You have only seen it from one perspective, when many others are available. The canopy of a forest can be an entirely different world. But how to get up to it, when the tallest trees…

Sunday morning, and we’re off to work. We put on our rubber boots and rain gear, gather equipment for the day, and walk a short twenty meters to the edge of the forest. From here, it is a half kilometer hike through the mud and roots to our first field site. To reach it, we…

Raining – but where? One of the surprising features of small islands and montane environments is the strong variability of climate with elevation. Here, you see a view from approximately 500 m elevation above sea level – the plain is sunny and clear, but the higher-elevation forest is shrouded in clouds. Here is another view,…

How glamorous is the day-to-day life of a field ecologist? The answer depends on how much you enjoy being uncomfortable in beautiful places. Here’s a vignette of a wonderful day in the forest. We begin the morning by consulting maps of the forest dynamics plot, planning locations to install our equipment and make our forest…