Earlier this week two students of the S.I.T. program arrived at Nanegal to run their semester projects here. This time around they won't be working in the reserve but in our headquarters down here in La Delicia. Both topics are very interesting and pretty novel stuff for us.
One student is looking into our bird monitoring data and is trying to model bird species abundance based on climate and weather data.
The other project is about the effect of epiphytes on citric trees. It is a common practice that locals who grow citric trees strip them clean off all epiphytes (especially Bromeliads and mosses) and the student is trying to see whether this has any effect on yield and photosynthetic capatibilities of the trees. Might well be that there is even a positive effect.
The students enjoy our full support - we hope they enjoy their time here and will come up with interesting results at the end of their stay.