This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The mission of the Institute for Tropical Ecosystem Studies (ITES) of The University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP) is to serve as a world center for advanced research and education in tropical ecosystem ecology and management, and, as such, ITES strives to establish and maintain long-term experimental and reference studies of tropical ecosystems through interdisciplinary research. Funding is provided to UPR-RP to renovate the basement floor of the Facundo Bueso Building. These renovations will support the development of the ITES Research Center by enhancing the level of research activities and increasing the impacts of its programs. ITES is the home of the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, a multidisciplinary collaboration investigating tropical ecosystem dynamics along a rural-urban gradient that includes the International Institute of Tropical Forestry (USDA Forest Service) and eleven mainland US institutions. The new center would place most of ITES's research and related student training in a single facility. The remodel will consolidate the research facilities, which are currently distributed over four buildings in two different areas of campus, on the basement floor of the Facundo Bueso Building. Renovations include modernization of the electrical and lighting system, plumbing, the HVAC system, and casework and the addition of fixed equipment. The spaces will also be redesigned specifically for the type of research performed in the new laboratories. Increased cohesion among faculty and students and administrators (located in an adjacent building) would be a direct result of this effort. Moreover, the creation of a single facility for ITES would contribute strongly to its role as a nexus for the development of integrative research activities on the UPR campus as well as for the island of Puerto Rico. The new Center will allow further expansion in research training. At present, faculty members supervise the research of 42 BS, 18 MS, 18 PhD students, 3 postdocs, and 14 research staff. Therefore, in addition to the ITES faculty, staff and students will benefit from this renovation.
The remodeling project was instrumental in transforming deteriorated and obsolete work space into state-of-the art laboratory facilities capable of handling the demands imposed by scientific research in the 21st century. The remodeled facilities for the Tropical Ecology and Environmental Sciences Laboratory support cutting edge research in science areas (Tropical Forestry, Soil Biogeochemistry, Tropical Plant Ecology and Evolution, Stream Ecology and Atmospheric Chemistry) lead by six faculty researchers and three research technicians. These core researchers support 30 different research projects with 65 US and International collaborators distributed across 44 different institutions. Facilities allow for the development, and application of new techniques not possible prior to the remodeling work. Some of these include rooms dedicated to gravimetric analyses, analytical instrumentation and air quality monitoring, clean rooms for soil microbial analyses. Facilities have a direct impact on 124 students with different levels of formal education all the way from middle school to graduate school (Figure 2). The students to be engaged in research at these facilities come from a variety of academic areas including Environmental Sciences (most students), Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Urban Planning and Psychology (Figure 3). Facilities are managed by the Department of Environmental Sciences which administers an undergraduate program in Environmental Sciences (145 students) as well as a graduate program in Environmental Sciences which offers Masters and PhD degrees (58 students). Activities in remodeled laboratory activities will also support educational programs led by researchers directly associated to these facilities: 1) The Luquillo LTER Schoolyard (NSF-LTER) engages four rural high schools in Puerto Rico and has focused on the establishment and monitoring of long-term plots near these schools, and the training of Science teachers and advanced students at those schools. The Program "From Hectares to Nanometers" (NSF-GK-12) funds graduate student fellowships to form interdisciplinary teams (one fellow-one k-12 teacher) that impact science education at urban Middle Schools. Following remodeling of FB research facilities The Tropical Ecology and Environmental Laboratory Facilities will seek to train at K-12 teachers in laboratory techniques that can be transferred to their Schoolyard or GK-12 research or education activities. Teachers working with researchers associated to both programs would impact approximately 470 students from grades 7-12. The REU in Tropical Ecology and Evolution hosts research experiences for eight students every summer at the El Verde Field station. Research activities often need complementary laboratory analyses on campus and will be using these facilities. USDA- Natural Resource Career Tracks Program serves 48 undergraduate students who are connected to research internships during the summer and to laboratory projects throughout the remainder of the academic year
