The End of an Era

After over 6 years of intensive research and community development work in and around the Yachana Reserve, GVI Amazon is coming to a close. We have finished our final research project (look forward to our Road Effects paper, coming soon!) and are handing over the project to our partner, The Yachana Foundation. They will continue to maintain and monitor the reserve, using it as an hands-on science education center for students -- we're very excited to see what fabulous things this next generation of scientists find! For more detail on GVI Amazon's closure, and our accomplishments over the years, please read on...
GVI Amazon Closure Statement

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Avian and Amphibian Antics

A busy week with GVI Amazon was jam-packed with all sorts of activities to keep the volunteers out of mischief! After closing the amphibian pitfalls, the project’s preliminary results showed a higher species richness within the primary forest compared to that of the secondary forest. There will of course be a lot more analysis of the statistics in coming months as there will still be more sessions of opening the traps throughout the course of the year, as just over six months of the planned one year study have been completed so far. Continuing on the amphibian theme, night transects began in earnest for the first time this phase with some successful results. In one transect, 16 separate individuals were found including Edalorhina perezi. That’s some good eagle-eyed spotting from the volunteers.

On the birding front, a surprise Piha project kicked off at the unsociable hour of 5.30am! It was however, an enjoyable introduction to a new project on Screaming Pihas (Lipaugus vociferans) and their calling behaviours. Sam Brimble was further surprised by the Western Striped Forest Pit Viper (Bothriopsis bilineata) centimetres from her head during this particular trip! That’s a couple of tricky snake encounters she’s had over the past couple of weeks.

For this particular phase, the first bird transects along the road (small gravel track, that cuts through the reserve) took place and teemed with a plethora of birds; these will be continuing throughout the following weeks to build on the data already collected last phase for this particular stretch of the reserve. Finally, initial work into a study about birds in relation to fruiting trees got underway, with promising prospects. Watch this space in the future to see how things progress.

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