Wednesday 12/11/19 First Day in the Field

Day 4 Costa Rica

Good Luck Ceremony 
This morning we had the honor to receive a blessing and good luck ceremony by the head tribal leader of the Embera tribe of Panama near Columbia. It was a great honor to be able to receive this from someone from such high regard in his tribe and it is an honor that he is here sharing his culture with us. The picture above is of an elder of the Ngobe tribe and tribal leader/chief of the Embera tribe. Today was our first day in the field with our perspective mentors. My mentor is Corbin and he is a Phd student studying Microbiology. Today we hiked down to the Rio Java again and set up our plots for our research. I was happy that we got to have some good luck before this journey because I thought the river would have a lot of snakes. To my surprise, I did not see one snake today! I am again, very thankful to have the group of Indigenous Peoples here with us and their presence has made this experience that much more enjoyable. The elderly man is a medicine man who knows a lot about medicinal plants. It would be great if he is able to show us some plants and how some of them are used.
Rio Java


The Rio Java is fairly small at least where we hiked too. This is a picture of a pool we found and may or may not have slipped into (on accident). The rocks near the river were super slippery and some spots were deep. Our boots were not high enough and got filled with water. We set up our plots of where we were going to survey our plants at in three different locations along the river. We are interested in presence of plant disease along the 'selectively logged' part of the forest which is on the side closest to the station. Every day we will be going out and taking pictures of five random plants and marking them with ribbon. Then we will use Image J software to determine the severity of disease of randomly selected plants to gauge general plant disease along one side of the river. We also have Kestrel Meters set up at each location that are taking readings of humidity, temperature etc. I am excited to see the data and see how this project comes together in the end. So far, it has been interesting and different from my previous research experiences. I do enjoy plants but would have liked to learn about the species of these plants as well. Overall, today was a productive research day.

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