El Botanico

David: A very important part of developing quality research and education at QERC is having talented and motivated partners who are interested in progressing the conservation mission of QERC. Over the past year SNU has developed one such relationship with a researcher/ professor from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Bruce Hoagland is a faculty member of the OU Geography Department and coordinator of the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory (www.oknaturalheritage.ou.edu). Around here I introduced him as un botanico y un experto con orquideas because botany is his area of study and he is indeed an expert on orchids. Bruce spent two weeks here at QERC in February as exploratory time to see what possibilities there might be at QERC, and most recently he just departed a few days ago after spending two and a half weeks with us working on several projects. The two and a half weeks that Bruce just spent with us were full of a lot of field time, hard work, and good company. We had three main projects to work on: 1)QERC orchidarium 2)aguacatillo phenology study 3)QERCnet weather stations.

Being that Bruce is an orchid enthusiast and orchidologist by trade, the vast numbers of orchids found in our forests here in San Gerardo de Dota kept him on his toes. One of his ideas that will support our efforts of both education and research is the construction of a structure to house orchids that have fallen from their epiphytic homes and land on the forest floor. The orchidarium, or orchidario in Spanish, will be a home to place those fallen orchids and use them as an educational tool. Their close proximity to our station also will allow students and researchers to conveniently study flowering, fruiting, and pollintating of the species we will have represented. The picture above shows the beginnings of the orchidarium. Upon Bruce's next trip in Janauary we will erect the final structure to provide nice shade for the plants. The picture below the orchidarium is of one of our prize orchids that is flowering at the moment.

The aguacatillo phenology study is one that you should be somewhat familiar with as I've written about it in the past. Bruce is coming along side QERC to help us organize and streamline this study in order to produce some long-term assessment of how the topography and climate of our location affect the flowering and fruiting cycle of these important trees. You probably remember that the quetzals are very much linked to the fruiting cycle of these trees. Bruce will be a very important partner for the future in analyzing the data that has been collected over the past 15 years and ensuring that the research and monitoring moves forward in the right direction. So while he was here I was able to give him an introduction to the many trees that we have relocated in the past year. During the time we spent visiting the trees we brainstormed methods and protocols for how the data collection should be done. One bit of information I learned is that new tree growth coming off the main trunk that creates a secondary trunk is officially called a "sucker." As you can imagine we saw some skinny suckers, big suckers, and even a group of suckers. The situation would become tense when one of us would sternly state, "Watch out for those suckers!"

The QERCnet is a very exciting research infrastructure project that has been developed cooperatively between Bruce and SNU. If you are familiar with the topography of San Gerardo de Dota you know that the mountains are steep with many ridges creating many small valleys and elevation changes very quickly as you move around anywhere. As the QERCnet is continually developed more and more, independent climate monitoring stations will be set at intervals of 25 meters of elevation change in a way that would resemble someone casting a fishing net over the topography of the Chacons private forest preserve. The long term value of this for QERC has many applications in research. We will be able to see patterns in the movement of air and moisture through the labyrinth of contours in the mountains. We'll start piecing together information on the climate of micro-habitats which will undoubtedly aid in explaining why plants grow successfully where they are growing and why animals are choosing space to use utilize. One other very exciting application is that the current line of equipment we are preparing to install will start in the primary forest and move down into an area of successional growth that once was pasture land and is reforesting itself. As data is collected over the years we will be able to see how the reforestation process slowly changes the climate of the land. It's commonly known that clear-cutting natural vegetation will affect the weather cycle and it will be very exciting to be able to track this change over the years as the forest returns to normal, which could take up to 200-500 years. So there is the idea, and while Bruce was here we spent many, many hours wielding machetes in order to bushwhack our way through vegetation to find the optimum placement for these upcoming 7 stations. We made very good progress and hope that by the end of January all 7 stations will be installed and collecting data.

And finally, in the spirit of orchid enthusiasm, we leave you with some orchid pictures that we snapped at the Lankester Botanical Gardens which we visited with Bruce on his way back into San Jose.