We are setting up our web pages today:  July 17, 1999

Today is Monday, 26 July 1999.  I have been in Costa Rica now for a week and a half with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by the National Science Foundation.  My name is Peg L. Goldman.  I teach middle school and high school science in Vermont, USA.

My experience with colleagues, tropical scinentists, and native Costa Ricans has been invaluable.  So far we have studied at the La Selva Organization of Tropical Studies Research Station.  We currently are at the Palo Verde OTS.

La Selva Field Station is located in the tropical rain forest; Palo Verde Field Station is located in the tropical dry forest.  The howler monkeys were present in both stations, but I only saw them at Palo Verde.  The leaf cutter ants were present only at La Selva (Jim Wetterer's leaf cutter ant).

I have been keeping a daily journal but will not include it here.  At each station we have/will complete a research project.  My La Selva project was to compare the water runoff of the primary rain forest with that of the secondary rain forest.  My partners Ken Carlson, Ruth Juhant, Kermit Simons,and Carol Paine worked well together and had a very exciting and invigorating time in the process of collecting data.  Carol has exquisite photographs which will be on her web page.

My Palo Verde Project has been mentored by Phillipe Hensel.  We (Ken, Ruth, Ingrid Chlup, Jamilia Daulatzai, and myself) are studying the Pochote tree.  This tree has not been written about much in the scientific literature and Phillipe thinks we may possibly publish our findings.  Yesterday we made sitings for about 12 Pochote trees.  At each tree site we will measure many independent variables.  The dependent variables we are measuring are the density of the spines and the dimensions of the spines.

This is a branch scan of the Pochota Tree.  We did  this at the scanner at the Palo Verde Library  (very  high technology for a site without telephones, faxes,  or e-mail).  The leaves are palmately compound with          reticulate tertiary veins.

I have taken many photographs and would like to add them to my web page on return to the U.S.  I will be developing them as disks as well as photograph prints.

Here at Las Cruces I am working with Rodolfo Quiros F.  I plan to collect and press flowering plants from the fragmented forest here for the Las Cruces Herbarium.  Rodo has described the correct technique (double of all specimens, and pressed with one leaf up, one down, flowers up, pressed very tightly for 24 - 48 hours and dried, and then mounted).

The connection with global change, as with the other two OTS sites we have researched, demonstrates the biodiversity and phylogenetic differences correlated with the process of fragmentation.