 OTS News
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Attention All OTS Students, Faculty, and Alumni:
 The OTS Membership Consortium Committee is pleased to announce the Fourth Annual OTS Student Paper Award. We invite nominations for a $500 cash prize for excellence in research via an outstanding publication in tropical biology written by a student.
Applications will be reviewed by a subcommittee of the OTS Assembly of Delegates. Papers will judged upon the paper's contribution to the field of biology, including originality, study design, and potential impact.
Application deadline is Friday, October 19, 2012. Send nomination packet as a pdf file to the chair of the Awards Committee, Dr. Kim Smith at kgsmith@uark.edu. To download the flyer, click here Announcement of the award recipient will be made at the March 2013 OTS Board of Directors meeting and recognized at the 2013 ATBC-OTS meeting. |
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REU Publications Now Available Online
OTS is committed to increasing the participation of women, ethnic minorities, and economically disadvantaged students underrepresented in science. As part of this effort, OTS and the National Science Foundation offer a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the La Selva Biological Station that provides hands-on, field-oriented research experiences to undergraduate students from the United States.
Students complete an independent research project in the field, working with an experienced tropical ecologist, from the project planning stage through to symposium presentation and potential publication. For more than ten years, ten undergraduates have been selected annually through a competitive application process for an eight-week research program at the world-renowned La Selva Biological Station in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. The program provides students with room and board at the station, a summer stipend, international flight to Costa Rica and equipment for their research.
A collection of publications that have resulted from REU research is now available online. If you are a previous La Selva REU mentor or student and have an additional paper to include in the list, please send the information to undergradprograms@ots.ac.cr.
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OTS Ranks #1
 The OTS Tropical Biology program was rated the No. 1 Study Abroad Experience in the sciences and No. 8 in Top Academic Study Abroad Experiences, determined by Abroad101.com. These rankings are based on content extracted from over 16,000 student reviews collected on the Abroad101 website. Many factors contributed to the final calculated rankings, including overall ratings given by students, number of reviews available, recency of reviews available, and in many cases, additional relevant data points found in Abroad101's review form.
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OTS 2013-2014 Graduate Course Schedule Now Available
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Tropical Biology 2013-3
Tropical Biology: An Ecological Approach (also known as the Fundamentals Course) is an intensive and immersive, eight-week, field-experience for graduate students. This tropical biology field course has continued to evolve since first offered in 1965. It has trained a legion of influential biologists over the past five decades. While visiting diverse field sites throughout Costa Rica, students gain invaluable experience learning tropical flora and fauna, designing field problems, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting results in both oral presentations and written reports.
Additionally, as part of the celebration commemorating the 50th anniversary of OTS and the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), all students attending the Tropical Biology 2013-3 course will receive full fellowships to attend the ATBC-OTS meeting in San José. This will be an especially exciting conference with many opportunities to interact with top tropical biologists from around the world.
Students in this program will forge lifelong contacts and friendships in the field of tropical ecology. This program will enhance your career as a scientist by providing you with the tools you need to thrive as a biologist.
Application Form
Course Flyer
Summer Session: June 07-July 29, 2013.
Arrive June 6, depart July 30, 2013.
Early application deadline: November 1, 2012.
Final application deadline: February 1, 2013 followed by Open Enrollment/rolling admission until course is full.
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OTS Specialty Course: Tropical Ferns and Lycophytes
OTS is, once again, proud to offer the Tropical  Ferns and Lycophytes, an intense 15-day specialty graduate course. This course is designed to build diverse skills in field-introduction to the identification, classification, phylogenetics, ecology, and reproductive biology of tropical ferns and lycophytes.
It begins on January 9 and runs through January 23, 2013 at both the Las Cruces and La Selva Biological Stations. Faculty include Dr. Robbin Moran of New York Botanical Garden and Dr. James Watkins of Colgate University, as well as invited professors Drs. Kathleen Pryer and Michael Windham, both of Duke University.
The original October 1 deadline has passed, so we are in the rolling admissions period. The course is nearly full, so apply soon to reserve your place in the course!
A link to course information can be found here or for registration, contact Barbara Lewis barbara.lewis@ots.ac.cr or view the OTS website at www.ots.duke.edu |
Station Updates
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RCN Leaf Litter Workshop at La Selva
 On September14-15, 2012, A Leaf Litter Workshop was held at La Selva Biological Station as part of the NSF-funded "Research Coordination Network: Tropical Forests in a Changing World." The workshop was attended by nine faculty, one postdoc, and one graduate student.
Participants included Dr. Salvatore Agosta, Virginia Commonwealth University Dr. Liza Comita, Ohio State University Dr. Daniela Cusack, University of California---Los Angeles Dr. Mike Kaspari, University of Oklahoma Dr. Jennifer Powers, University of Minnesota Kelsey Reider, University of Florida Dr. Douglas Robinson, Oregon State University Dr. Stefan Schnitzer, University of Wisconsin---Milwaukee Dr. Jeff Stratford, Wilkes University Dr. Steven Whitfield, University of South Dakota Not pictured: Dr. Steve Yanoviak, University of Louisville
The group actively discussed the role that changes in leaf litter dynamics play in tropical forests. Faculty ranged in experience from new Assistant Professors to mid-career professors to established Full Professors. Expertise included brown food web dynamics, soil biology, leaf litter chemistry and decomposition dynamics, tree and liana community ecology, biology of terrestrial arthropods and detritivores, biology of terrestrial amphibians and birds, and tropical community ecology. The discussions focused on sharing current knowledge of how portions of the brown food web may change as tropical forest environmental conditions are modified via climate or land-use alteration.
Several collaborative grants were initiated by subsets of the whole group and at least one review paper is being developed. They also shared information about current large-scale experiments underway where additional surveys of arthropods, amphibians and birds will be added to understand how manipulations of litter and soil chemistry affect the forest floor.
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Field Notes
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Fall 2012 Undergraduates Arrive in South Africa
 The newest undergraduate session began in South Africa with the arrival of twenty-five students in Nylsvley Nature Reserve in Limpopo Province, South Africa on August 26, 2012. The OTS staff has created a newsletter, The OTS Tyemes to document their adventures.
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External News
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Field Botany Course in China Opens Registration
Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden is offering a course which will arm students with an ability to identify plants in the field, thereby enhancing the quality of observations they may make in the course of their research. It is a course for non-plant taxonomy majors. Everyday we will collect plant material from the field and learn the field characters for identifying them. As we are collecting plants directly in the field, we will be dealing mainly with sterile material and sterile characters. This is deliberate since this is how plants are most often encountered. In the afternoons, we will review the day's collecting, look at herbarium material, and arrange our observations within a systematic framework. In addition, we will have a series of lectures relating to the study of plants, on topics ranging from DNA-barcoding to plant ecophysiology. The course also benefits from its location: XTBG has a phylogenetically diverse living collection of over 12000 plant species, including many thematic collections, a herbarium with over 100000 specimens focused on tropical China and Indo-China, and research laboratories studying plant genomics, plant resources, plant geography, plant-animal co-evolution, ecology and conservation.
Registration: Open. Application results will be announced in early March 2012.
Venue: Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (near Jinghong), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan, China
Dates: 04 April - 23 April 2013 (19 days)
Organizer: Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Laboratory for Plant Geography, XTBG
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