In the highlands of Atenas, students investigate how tropical ecosystems recover, adapt, and persist in a country that holds five percent of the world's species.
Iguanas sun themselves on the porch while hummingbirds work the gardens. The SFS Center for Ecological Resilience Studies sits on an active farm in Atenas, overlooking the Río Grande and Central Valley. Costa Rica packs five percent of Earth's species into a country you can drive across in a day: cloud forest, dry forest, lowland rainforest, and páramo above the cloud line, each a few hours apart and all of them under pressure. The question here is whether the systems protecting them can hold.
Students climb into tree canopies to set camera traps and catch bats after dark in fragmented forests, measuring what survives in the patches between farms. They work alongside ASADAs, community water associations that guard the springs supplying up to 60% of a town's drinking water and the forest around them. Every question here connects working farms to protected wilderness, and whether the corridors between them are healing or just holding.
Fourteen years on from the first SFS survey of the Quebrada Matías, students climbed the canopy on double ropes and heat-mapped the pollution and forest loss along the stream.
About 250 of Costa Rica's bird species are migrants. A week of mist netting found no gap in body condition between a resident and a migrant, hinting that residents take the influx in stride.
Could Monteverde support produce moving straight from farm to household? Students put the question to growers and to shoppers, and sent the findings to three local organizations.
Modeled how three highland salamanders look to a bird, a snake, and another salamander. Dark and orange animals stood out to every eye, while tan ones disappeared against the ground.
Fieldwork moves with the research. Students study in mist-fed cloud forests, run field experiments in fire-adapted dry forest, and follow trails through Caribbean lowland rainforest. Sites shift as projects and partnerships evolve, and open-air classrooms keep the landscape close.
The center is an active farm overlooking Costa Rica's Central Valley, where dorms and classrooms intermingle with vegetable gardens, a greenhouse, an edible forest, and a mushroom production facility. Students gather mangoes from campus trees, collect eggs from the chicken coop, harvest kale from the garden, and help turn kitchen scraps into compost, all before heading to coffee cooperatives and chocolate farms in nearby Atenas. Semester-end Community Research Night shares all data with local NGOs and government agencies.
Enrolling now for Spring 2027, Summer 2027, and Fall 2027.
