Notes from the FieldNFF·012A Note from our Executive Director
A Field Course Far Afield
From the southern Appalachians to the high Andes — students compared two of the world's most storied mountain ecosystems firsthand.
The high páramo on the flanks of Antisana Volcano, Ecuador
I'm fresh back from Ecuador and the successful 4th run of our "Temperate-Tropical Ecology & Biogeography" field course!
There may be no place like home, but there's perhaps no better way for young biologists to appreciate their familiar "ecological" home here than to travel to distant lands and different ecosystems, and directly compare the two. With HBS as our southern Appalachian base and Wildsumaco Biological Station as our base in the high Andes of Ecuador, our students compared firsthand how geology, topography, and latitude shape biological communities.
The same physical effects of elevation, slope, and aspect apply in the Appalachians and Andes, but the different histories of North and South America in time and space make for quite a dramatic contrast in biological community structure and makeup: each with a unique cast of characters in the grand "ecological theater and evolutionary play" — as the distinguished 20th century ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson put it — but on a world stage.
Jim Costa · Executive Director, Highlands Biological Station
The route
We take "field course" to a whole new level, literally and figuratively!
Two stages, one play
Appalachians and Andes
Field guide
Páramo flora & fauna · field encounters
Wildsumaco
Rainforest & volcano
Along the way
About this dispatch
From the Andes to Appalachia, a Young Biologist Finds Common Ground
Juan Pablo Castro came north from Quito for the salamanders and stayed for everything else. The Highlands Plateau, he found, reads a lot like an Andean cloud forest.
Notes from the Field is published by Highlands Biological Station, a center of Western Carolina University.