Questions

I'm sitting round the table with everyone in our bare dirt floor shack painfully trying to pry research questions out of nascent scientific minds. Leah and Seth are a big help and from a dubious beginning we finally got the ball rolling. Here's what we came up with;

Bonnie and Sarah -- Birds and frog abundance and diversity across newly burned, grassy paramo, and brushy paramo vegetation types.

Arthur and Intefada -- A megatransect of frog diversity in the Tamimanga valley with Alejandro to monitor and document known and unknown species.

Sierra -- Puya clavis herculis (Giant Puya) seed distribution and patterning across the landscape.

Hannah -- Persistence and re-growth rates of woody vegetation after paramo burning.

Ryan -- An ethnography of land use change and ecosystem services in the Mazar Watershed.

Jessie -- Ethnobotany and traditional uses of paramo plants.

It's a promising start. I'll take over advising half and Leah and Seth the other half. I've got birds, amphibians, and ethnobotany under my belt. I'll leave vegetation, soils, and carbon accounting to Leah and Seth. Scouting research transects in the afternoon with the students I glimpsed a hawk high up on the hillside perched on a puya stalk. I watched him for a long while up there as the mist came in over the ridge obscuring that silhouette proud and regal. And then suddenly he flew off soaring over the hills just a speck on the horizon. Free.

Man I envied him.