We are pleased to present the winning design in the 2015 OTS T-shirt contest! Thank you to everyone who voted.      

The OTS membership t-shirt is only available to OTS members in appreciation for their contribution of $50 or more.  The t-shirt will be available in June -- renew your membership and request your 2014 t-shirt today!

  

 

The Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) program on "Emerging Frontiers in Tropical Science" identifies emerging issues in tropical science and draws together scientists across a range of disciplines, institutions, and geographies to holistically address these issues. Through this program, OTS aims to advance multi-disciplinary, multi-scale efforts working on cutting-edge issues that have the ability to transform tropical science and education. This program seeks to catalyze research conducted in and around OTS research stations in Costa Rica.

The first winners of the EFTS Grant competition traveled to OTS Las Cruces Biological station in March 2013 to participate in the OTS Emerging Frontiers Workshop at Las Cruces. The primary product of this workshop was a paper, titled The emerging field of geogenomics: Constraining geological problems with genetic data, which was recently published in Earth Sciences Reviews.  The group was selected by the committee because they are focusing on a true emerging frontier in tropical science, as this paper shows.

Abstract:
The development of a genomics-derived discipline within geology is timely, as a result of major advances in acquiring and processing geologically relevant genetic data. This paper articulates the emerging field of "geogenomics", which involves the use of large-scale genetic data to constrain geological hypotheses. The paper introduces geogenomics and discusses how hypotheses can be addressed through collaboration between geologists and evolutionary biologists. As an example, geogenomic methods are applied to evaluate competing hypotheses regarding the timing of the Andean uplift, the closure of the Isthmus of Panama, the onset of trans-Amazon drainage, and Quaternary climate variation in the Neotropics.

Authors:
Paul A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Christopher W. Dick, Andrew J. Eckert, Brian K. Horton, Stefano Manzoni, Camila C. Ribas, Carmala N. Garzione, David S. Battisti

To read the full paper, please click here.

 Tropical Conservation & Sustainable Development: Law, Policy & Professional Practice

NEW- Systematics, Ecology, Evolution and Uses of Palms

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Monitoring Tropical Forest Dynamics in a Changing Climate

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Monitoring Terrestrial Vertebrates Using Camera Traps: Field and Analytical Techniques

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