2022 CSU-LSAMP Costa Rica Research Expedition

 



The 2022 CSU-LSAMP Costa Rica Research Expedition is underway! After three years of anticipation, we are back in-person; eight LSAMP students from four different CSU campuses are participating this year in a truncated version of past summer expeditions. This year we'll be focusing on a group research project in the small village of  Mastatal (pop. 150), exploring the relative contributions of farmlands, pasture, and forest fragments to arthropod biodiversity. The expedition will be bookended by a few days learning about sustainable coffee production as well as the coastal environment.

The students arrived early on Thursday morning, and we headed off by bus to Santa Maria de Dota, a small town in the coffee highlands in the world-famous Tarrazú region. Friday morning featured a tour of the nearby CoopeDota production facilities (including coffee tasting, or "cupping"), followed by a few hours of lecture and discussion that served as an introduction to ecological concepts pertaining to sustainable coffee as well as a refresher/introduction to some statistics that we'll be using throughout the expedition. Saturday morning we headed up to 1600m above sea level (around 5250 ft.), where we had a chance to visit a working coffee farm and collect some data on bean production. We'll analyze these data using some of the statistical methods we learned yesterday in order to test some hypotheses about coffee pollination and habitat diversity -- and a warm-up in anticipation of further data analyses in the main group research project in Mastatal next week. In the meantime, everyone is getting adjusted to life as a tropical field researcher -- and of course enjoying exploring new foods and meeting new people!


 















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