Packing up

We visited Foudacion Cordillera in the morning with the students to get a better grasp on the projects we want to work on in the field this next week. The whole idea of Roundrivers programs are to expose and engage students in applied conservation research in wild places. To that end the students will be each taking the lead on a project Foudacion Cordillera would like to implement. The projects that the Foundacion would like to see done this year include setting out camera traps in the Gasual Pampa area to monitor wildlife diversity there, especially Andean bears, puma, maybe even mountain tapir. Who knows what we may find in these forests? Another project is overlaying GIS (that means Geographic Information Systems) through several decades to show land use change in parts of our study areas. Finally, we will be setting up mammal and amphibian transects in the cloud forest near camp in La Libertad for monitoring purposes. Each of the students will take the lead on one of these. Meeting Stu at the Foudacion he is unsurprisingly full of optimism and good ideas so many in fact that we have to filter them, the plausible to the unrealistic for our already cramped time frame.

Tomorrow we leave and I am secretly sending out prayers for a trip without breakdowns already. Whatever the case I am excited to get started (especially with the camera traps maybe I can even blip a puma!). For now, youll have to settle for this motorcycle lying idle beside the cracked plaster walls of Cuencas side streets. Thinking of a friend :)