This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Funds provided by this award will permit the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a 501(c) (3) consortium of universities and research institutions based in the United States to renovate and upgrade its La Selva Biological research facilities and laboratory infrastructure. La Selva handles approximately 33,000 to 35,000 person-days of use a year. Annually, between 270 and 300 scientists base their research at the station, more than 100 courses structure their offerings around stays to the station, which results in more than a 1,000 students visiting the station from the U.S. The La Selva Biological Station has been an active, vibrant intellectual center for tropical scientists for more than 40 years, with an impressive record of over 3,400 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Just as new technologies in embedded sensors, hyperspectral satellite imagining, and microbiology are coming on-line at La Selva, OTS finds itself constrained in both the quantity and quality of laboratory space it can offer to established senior scientists and young start-of-career researchers. The proposed renovations of laboratory space would a) increase the number of individual lab spaces, enabling La Selva to accommodate more researchers during the high seasons, b) create a general use microbiology laboratory, c) reinforce walls and provide new air conditioning units for the analytic lab and the first floor of the laboratory building to create work spaces compatible with delicate instrumentation, d) install fume hoods capable of safely handling innovative microbiology experiments, e) create a generally more conducive environment for intellectual exchange and collaboration, and f) provide a solid infrastructure to permit the next phases of expansion and laboratory instrumentation. These renovations would make the La Selva facilities a truly state-of-the-art tropical research institute.
The ARI grant was awarded to the Organization for Tropical Studies, a consortium of nearly sixty universities, to renovate two older laboratories at the Organization's La Selva Biological Station located in the Caribbean lowland rainforest of Costa Rica. The first laboratory was built in the late-1970s and the second, an analytical laboratory, was constructed in the mid-1980s. The objectives of the NSF grant were to improve the operation of both laboratories by enabling OTS to acquire new fume hoods and new air conditioning units to replace the original, nearly forty-year-old equipment and to install a cold room for storage samples to remove the aging refrigerators found throughout both facilities. In addition, the grant allowed OTS to renovate the interior of the two buildings to create additional work-laboratory space for the growing number of U.S. scientists conducting their research at the station and to remodel the ambient laboratory space in the analytical laboratory into a general-use microbiology laboratory. Finally, the analytical laboratory's windows were reframed to eliminate the escape of air conditioning and the build up of condensation on the windows from the harsh tropical environment. As a result of this work, both labs were fully functional over the busy, summer-research season by researchers from throughout the U.S. academic community, by graduate students working on their dissertations, and by undergraduates selected from groups under-represented in the sciences who were recipients of a mentored, site-based REU program at the station.
