Scientist at Work Blog: Back From Coffee Country, Mostly Unscathed

S. Amanda Caudill, a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island, writes from Costa Rica, where she is assessing mammal diversity on coffee farms.

Wednesday, Feb. 15
We have collected a robust data set, spent more than 150 days working in the field and sampled more than 180 acres of coffee landscape in this seven-month period. To date, we have captured more than 1,000 animals at our three sites and seen at least 15 different mammal species.

On the way up the mountainous roads to the Aquiares site, in our old 1970s Land Rover full of traps and people, the brakes gave out. The car started slowly sliding backward towards the edge of the road that dropped off into a ravine. The foot brakes and emergency brakes didn?t hold. Luckily, the car stopped before toppling over the edge. We made it up the hill and around to the road where we dropped off our first set of traps, and then the car started sliding backward again, almost hitting a tree ? but a ditch in the road stopped the car before it made contact. Now the car is in the shop and we are back to taking the public buses for a couple of days until the brakes can be fixed.

We all have plenty of scrapes, cuts, bruises and sore muscles, but our only hospital trip was to get stitches for Jesus after a machete accident on our first week of fieldwork. We saw tons of snakes, but thankfully no one got bitten.

I had a wonderful team during these past couple of months. My field assistants, Chris Russell, Caroline Oswald and Maureen Thompson, have taken the initiative and responsibilities of their own within the research, kept up a positive outlook through both the fun times and the challenges and helped keep me sane. My advisers on this project, Thomas Husband and Fabrice DeClerck, have provided a wealth of knowledge on field research, mammals, coffee certifications, agroforestry and, toward the end, car repairs.

I will be heading back to the States in a couple of weeks to finish up my last semester of classes at the University of Rhode Island, take the comprehensive exams for my doctorate degree and analyze all of this data that we have collected. Hopefully from the analysis, we will find correlations among the various habitat parameters and the mammal diversity and abundance. From there, we can provide suggestions to the coffee certifiers on how to enhance the habitat on the coffee farms for these mammals.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8e9f47c3c06130adf545d5e885b9d26a

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