News

The Organization for Tropical Studies is getting a reboot. Founded more than 50 years ago to guide research and natural resource use in the tropics, OTS offers intensive field courses for students and professionals at four field stations in Costa Rica and South Africa. But since its founding the field of tropical ecology has changed dramatically. We no longer have the luxury of a stable and reliable natural environment and must now contend with the rapid emergence of complex global threats. To better position the organization for the next 50 years, OTS has adopted a new purpose: To safeguard our tropical ecosystems by driving scientific discovery, changing human perception and guiding worldwide policy.

This past summer we were asked to help visualize this new purpose statement through the people, places and programs at two of OTS’s field stations in Costa Rica. We spent almost three weeks on the ground making images of students, researchers, farmers and the occasional sloth. Our trip began in the hot and sticky lowland forest at La Selva, a large field station with tremendous biodiversity and one of the most prolific publication rates in the world. We then traveled down to Las Cruces and the Wilson Botanical Garden nestled high in the cloud forest along the Panamanian border. Though it was the beginning of the rainy season and stations were not as frenetic as they often are, we were able to capture the core themes and get a good sense of this tremendously diverse and cherished organization.

Our time in Costa Rica was our first fieldwork as a family of three. Finn came along with us and out-hiked all of our expectations for what a three-year-old was up for in the tropical heat. (It didn’t hurt that there were monkeys, sloths, parrots and iguanas lining the trails.) He’s ready to go back and now asking, “Where are all the animals?” along our relatively quiet North Cascades trails.

Last week I traveled to Washington, DC to celebrate the public launch of this new chapter for OTS. The Costa Rican Embassy hosted a reception and we designed and installed a series of seven-foot diptychs that illustrate this new purpose statement. It was great to be able to bring this work from the deep forest all the way to the stakeholders and policy-makers that will help guide OTS into the future.

Find our OTS image library in the Archive.