Osa Peninsula Chronicles

The Costa Rican Ornithological Union’s second annual conference was held July 28 – 30th 2010 in the school of biology at the University of Costa Rica in the capital of San Jose.  The conference was dedicated to Daniel Janzen and his pioneering work in the field of conservation and reforestation in Costa Rica over the [...]

By: Zia Mehrabi, University of Oxford. The Osa Biodiversity Center (OBC) provided a brilliant opportunity for biological research at an accessible location bordering Corcovado National Park (CNP). CNP represents the largest remaining tract of tropical lowland forest left standing on the pacific coast of Central America. The Osa Peninsula is phytogeographically unusual with high floral species [...]

We’re excited to announce that we’ve officially kicked off our 2010 Sea Turtle Conservation Program on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, Central America.  This year we are expanding the program to cover Matapalo to Carate, a total of 18 km of patrolling to protect endangered sea turtles.  In previous years, our program covered the [...]

In the months of January and February this year, Friends of the Osa hosted Brooke Bessesen to conduct an important baseline survey of the marine fauna that inhabit the Golfo Dulce.  The project was funded by a Greg Gund Memorial Fellowship. Because the gulf is actually a tropical fjord, one of only four in the [...]

This week’s bird, the Violaceous Trogon (Trogon violaceus) jumped out at me (not literally) as I was having my morning coffee on my front porch here at Friends of the Osa’s Osa Biodiversity Center on Cerro Osa.   I was watching all the typical dawn action, mainly the Tropical Kingbirds and Gray-capped Flycatchers being overly vociferous [...]

By Samantha Weintraub PhD Student, University of Colorado, Boulder Ecology & Evolutionary Biology When most people wander through a tropical forest, they are awed by the diversity and abundance of plants, mammals and other members of the forest community they see.  While biodiversity is certainly a fantastic feature of tropical landscapes, my interests lie on [...]