Deep green trees peak through thick white clouds as the plane descends into Panama City. I am traveling to the Gamboa Rainforest Reserve with Elsa Mini Jos, a Utah State University Ph.D. candidate in the department of biology. Jos is presenting research she has been conducting on the nearby Barro Colorado Island, which is the primary field station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, commonly referred to as STRI.
It's the rainy season in this tropical country and as we start driving north along the Panama Canal, the sky opens up and rain pelts the car with a thunderous rage. We head out of the city, into Soberanía National Park, winding through the lush forest, crossing the Chagres River into the town of Gamboa.
The rain subsides as we pull into the reserve, nestled right in the national park, offering tourists an intimate rainforest experience. Crimson-backed, palm, and blue-gray tanagers snack on fruits and seeds in the treetops, agouti scurry below rooting around in the underbrush for any tasty morsel, keel-billed toucans fly together high above, searching for fruits. On the river below, caymans lay in wait for prey, and monkeys swing between trees along the banks, searching for fruiting trees or possibly a boatload of tourists offering up juicy fruit in hopes of a close up wildlife encounter. All the while sloths, bats, and frogs are just a few of the nocturnal creatures sleeping the day away, waiting for the cover of night. As the sun sets, the forest life changes.
Gamboa Rainforest Reserve is buzzing, and not just with the surrounding wildlife. It is June of 2024 and people from around the world have descended on the reserve to celebrate 100 years of research at Barro Colorado Island — or, as many refer to it, BCI.
Joe Wright is a forest and plant ecologist who has been contributing to research in Panama since the 1970s.
“It really brought together 50 years worth of BCI investigators and people who were there in the 60s, you know, identifying the bats. When they got there, they knew that BCI had a bat list that was 36 species of bats," Wright said. "They spent two years there and got the list up to 58 species, and now it's like 120, so, you know, these people did seminal work, we always talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. If they hadn't done that work, we wouldn't have the background that we have."
BCI was actually created in the early 1900s as a byproduct of flooding Gatun Lake. This flooding occurred in conjunction with the completion of the Panama Canal between 1912 and 1914. In the years following, Panama became an area of interest for tropical research for the U.S., and a research station was opened in 1924 on the newly formed island, with intent to focus on natural forest ecosystems.
Helene Miller-Landau first came to the research station as a graduate student in 1996 and has now been a senior scientist at STRI for over 15 years.
“Physically, the island was formed way back then, um, and kind of around the time the U.S. was here with the canal building effort, they commissioned the Smithsonian to do a Biological Survey of the country," Miller-Landau said.
BCI was not officially under management of the Smithsonian Institute until 1946. Now, it is a part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute which comprises a number of other research locations across Panama.
For three days the community celebrated, first focusing on the history of the field station and important research of the past and present. The celebration ended with where research is going for the STRI community.
“We wanted to kind of bring together more of those people who don't come very often, kind of look at the bigger picture, and look back and celebrate where we've been, you know, and see the breadth of where we are now, and look to the future, together envisioning how can we move forward on this,” shared Miller-Landau.
The founding of BCI has allowed numerous long term monitoring projects to flourish, bringing answers to foundational ecosystem questions, and it has brought people from across the world together in pursuit of understanding tropical forests.
University of Utah Professor Emeritus Lissy Coley opened the conference with a keynote address on forest ecosystems and her seminal work investigating plant defenses to herbivores. "So we have been studying young leaves and insect herbivores because we thing they are the major drivers of the ecology and evolution of tropical rainforests."
BCI has been the primary research site for many groups studying forest and ecosystem dynamics, including several labs at both Utah State University and University of Utah. An associate professor of biology at USU, Noelle Beckman is leading one of those research groups through her work on the role that seed chemistry plays in the dispersal of seeds within an ecosystem. The rich history and previous research associated with the island and institute has allowed researchers like Beckman the foundational knowledge to go deeper, answering questions otherwise very difficult to approach.
“So you don't have to start from scratch, but we can build on the information on the plant species that are there, the types of interactions that they had, and there's some information on some of the traits that they have, but that one of the pieces they were lacking was the fruit chemistry,” Beckman explained.
This series is made possible by support from the National Science Foundation.
