Reflections by Bern Sweeney

or the 40 years following Ruth Patrick’s pioneering study of the Conestoga River, almost all research on stream and river ecosystems was conducted in temperate regions. But in 1987 Dan Janzen, a well-known tropical ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania, invited the Stroud Center to help create a research park in the Guanacaste Conservation Area of northern Costa Rica. By early 1988 the Stroud Center had begun to transform a small farm near the base of the Orosi Volcano on the continental divide into a biological field station devoted to understanding tropical streams and their watersheds.

During the next two years, Stroud staff set up research projects and worked with local officials to design the Maritza Biological Station. Under an innovative "debt-for-nature" swap orchestrated by The Nature Conservancy and the Costa Rican government, the Stroud Foundation, the Stroud family and Ivan Maldonado, a family friend from Venezuela, provided the funds to construct and equip five buildings on the site. When President Rafael Calderon dedicated the Maritza Station as a permanent research facility on March 22, 1991, the Stroud staff already had intensive long-term investigations under way on the six streams that drain the volcano’s virgin forest. The ongoing research includes detailed studies of hydrology, biogeochemistry, organic chemistry, organic food inputs, population and community ecology, pesticide analyses and genetics.

Because so much of it is, quite literally, in uncharted waters, the work at Maritza recalls the early years at Stroud. Thousands of miles from Pennsylvania’s White Clay Creek, scientists are once again asking fundamental questions about the structure and function of streams. And they are trying to determine how tropical streams compare to the temperate ones on which they have spent their professional lives.

Already the studies have yielded some of the most extensive data sets and important insights ever produced on tropical stream ecosystems. Much of what the Stroud staff is learning is descriptive in nature, laying the foundation on which to build future knowledge. The constant heat and the seasonal weather patterns, in which dry spells follow periods of intense rainfall, make the tropics a vastly different habitat from anything the scientists have encountered before. In addition, researchers in northern waters almost never encounter streams as pristine as those around the Maritza Station.

The excitement of working in such an extraordinary environment keeps the scientists ever mindful of the urgency of their work. The pressures of exploding population growth and unbridled development in Costa Rica are taking an enormous toll on the country’s natural resources and environment. As a result, much of the basic research done by Stroud scientists finds immediate application in the face of pressing human needs — and data gathered at the Maritza Station are already enabling the scientists to provide important insights into stream and river pollution, not just in Costa Rica, but in tropical and developing regions around the world.