La Selva Research Station (OTS)

OTS established the La Selva Research Station in 1968. La Selva’s influence on tropical ecology is immeasurable and of great cultural significance, having served as a key training and research site for numerous professional scientists. It’s pioneered private forest conservation in Costa Rica, as it was the first of what is now a large network of private forest reserves in the country.

The species richness of La Selva is outstanding, with more than 2,077 species of plants; 125 species of mammals (72 of them bats); 470 species of birds; 48 amphibian species; 87 species of reptiles; 45 species of freshwater fish; and tens of thousands of insects, arachnids, and other arthropods.

The Station offers 1,600 hectares of well-preserved old-growth and recovering wet lowland tropical forest that abuts the Braulio Carrillo National Park. The 4 to 6 km wide forested corridor that connects La Selva at 35 m above sea level to the Barva Volcano at 2,906 m is one of the best-preserved elevational gradients in the tropics.

La Selva sits within a complex biological, socioeconomic, and political landscape that has been significantly transformed over the last 40 years by a continuously expanding agricultural frontier, burgeoning human population, and accompanying major infrastructure. Protected areas, such as La Selva, provide a rich opportunity for studying how natural ecosystems respond to a broader landscape matrix of human uses.

The Station has some of the longest running ecological data sets in the tropics, spanning up to 40+ years. Long-term research of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems has generated data on nutrient cycling, plant and animal demography (e.g. birds, trees, frogs, etc.), community interactions, and their responses to a changing climate.