Costa Rica: Caylynn Dedow
Program: UW Banking Animal Biodiversity in Costa Rica, Spring Break
Major: Genetics & Genomics
What is your most memorable experience from your program?
The most memorable experience I have from my week in Costa Rica was participating in a guided hike in the cloud forests of Monteverde. On this hike, our guide was extremely knowledgeable and shared amazing facts about the plants and animals we encountered. Many of the birds we saw we were able to view through the guide’s spotting scope and capture pictures with our phones. These birds were beautiful and many of them were very rare to see. It was amazing to watch the guide locate the bird from its call and then look in the canopy and be able to find where the bird producing the sound was located. In addition, we were able to watch a band of spider monkeys moving through the canopy right above us. That was such a cool experience!
Personally, my favorite part was getting to experience the different flora and plant diversity throughout the walk. The adaptations the trees and other plants have developed to survive in a unique environment were interesting to analyze. The guide pointed out the adaptations and explained them thoroughly, which I appreciated. My favorite part of this was the trees that were wrapped around by other trees, branches, and vines, having an abundance of moss growing on them as well. In addition, some of the tallest trees had large bases and roots that sprawled, unlike any tree I have seen in Wisconsin. Experts have dated certain parts of the forest back hundreds of years, and these trees show their age. The amount of knowledge I gained on the plants, animals, and history of the cloud forest in Monteverde made this experience so memorable.
What is the moment you are most proud of?
The moment I am most proud of while on this program was helping paint a local community center. This was a community of 500 people that had an open-air community center that needed to be repainted. We were able to work alongside the mayor and a board member to paint the entire inside of the building in two hours. In addition, we were able to paint the outside railings to look like wood, adding to the murals painted on the outside of their building. This made me proud because, as a group, we were efficient and hard-working, getting it done well. The community members were greatly appreciative of our work. This fresh coat of paint improved the building’s appearance and brought them pride and joy to be a part of their community. It was a joy to be a part of this experience.
Learning more about conversation biology and biological diversity on this program allowed me to consider the importance of my actions and efforts as an individual.
Describe your internship, research, or fieldwork and how the experience helped advance your career or studies.
One specific activity we completed at our final research station in the rainforest, La Selva, was going into their arboretum and measuring trees. This project was based on a previous project that had been conducted for 30 years, until 2011, when a lack of funding and manpower prevented them from continuing. Since then, they have sent out visiting students, like us, to continue measuring the trees. We followed their procedures just like they had followed during the project. This included looking at their map of the arboretum with posts to label every 25 meters. Within these boxes made by the posts were various numbers of trees and tree species. We had to locate the post that our assigned tree was found in, use a compass to determine which direction the tree is located from the post, and then walk the distance noted from the post to the tree. Once locating the correct tree, we would measure 1.3 meters off of the ground and measure at that point on the tree. We would use the tape measure to measure all the way around the tree, going under the vines to avoid adding any extra biomass. We would write down the circumference and continue this process for each of the ten trees we were assigned. Once we finished gathering the data, we brought it back to the station where it was entered into an Excel spreadsheet to be used for calculations.
The biologist at the station finished the calculations and showed us how much carbon dioxide has been sequestered in the forty trees we sampled since July 2011. Then, we estimated how much carbon dioxide was emitted from our plane travels to and from Costa Rica as a group. We found out that it would take approximately 120 years to sequester all of the carbon dioxide emitted from our flights to offset them if we relied on the forty trees we sampled. Obviously there are many more trees in the world than the 40 we sampled, but it is still sad to think about how long that would take, especially considering that there are thousands of flights every day, so many other sources of emissions, and harmful environmental practices like deforestation. This activity emphasized the importance of having net-zero carbon emissions and the efforts that go into reaching this, like reforestation. It emphasized the fact that reforestation and secondary forests are critical for reaching this goal and helped me have an urgency to help these efforts. This activity helped me better understand how my actions impact our environment and changes I can make to support a better future.
How will your experience benefit you in the future? How might it affect your future career or studies?
This study abroad experience will benefit me as I continue into graduate school because it has exposed me to another area of science that I have not discussed as much. Learning more about conversation biology and biological diversity on this program allowed me to consider the importance of my actions and efforts as an individual. As I work to get my PhD, I think considering the environmental impacts of my research and travel during it will be a good point of reflection. As a graduate student, I am in a unique role where I can directly impact a younger generation of scientists with the connections to make a difference with those in higher positions. Working with other graduate students, PIs, and corporations, I can start efforts to make research a more sustainable practice as well. This could be a fun challenge that I can tackle during graduate school that I had not even considered before. During my time in this program, I have become more passionate about helping our environment and supporting efforts to improve it. In addition to self reflection, I learned more about different animals and plants than I have ever been exposed to before, and it opened up more research questions for me to want to investigate. Overall, this experience has benefited me as a student, scientist, and member of society.