Hands on Field Experience

A typical day on any of our field excursions starts with an orientation walk. Here, the class is divided in small groups led by the staff and invited faculty. The groups switch faculty at specific points during the hike, to let students benefit from the expertise of resource people with different backgrounds.

The faculty and students will discuss the different aspects of the natural history and conservation issues of the organisms of the site while looking for group or individual project ideas. Orientation walks will continue in the afternoon depending on the conditions of the site. The nights are dedicated to data analysis or lectures given by the course faculty or invited speakers. The remaining days are dedicated to field experiments dealing with the natural history or conservation issues of the field site.

During these field trips, each student will conduct 4 ecology experiments and 3 conservation biology field projects as part of their field training. Each experiment/field project will be conducted in small groups (4-5 students) with the supervision of one of the instructors. Each field project is designed to test a hypothesis from a question in tropical ecology or conservation biology. The students will learn how to design field experiments, collect and analyze data, present their results in the format of a scientific paper, and give a scientific oral presentation to their peers. The best field projects of the class will be presented by the students in a special public forum poster session the last day of the program. Each group of students will give a brief oral presentation of their posters to the faculty and students of The University of Costa Rica.

Some sites may change to best represent the many diverse tropical habitats within Costa Rica.

Check out our current field excursion locations: