Students live where the Andes meet the Amazon and study the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth: its forests, rivers, and the communities that depend on them.
The trail drops from cloud forest into lowland jungle and the air thickens with every step. Bromeliads and orchids give way to buttress roots, bird calls change register, and by afternoon the same transect has passed through ecosystems that took millions of years to diverge. Near Tarapoto, in Peru's San Martín region, the Andes fold into the Amazon across one of the steepest elevational gradients on Earth, and along it more species per hectare crowd into the forest than almost anywhere else. The center sits at the edge of the region's main conservation area, where that gradient is both the laboratory and the lesson.
The campus itself is a two-acre clearing at the edge of Tarapoto, where the forest presses close enough that monkeys pass through daily and the bird list keeps growing from the balcony. A trail leads into the neighboring conservation area, where premontane forest climbs toward Sub-Andean ridgelines. Research follows that closeness: faculty and students track bats and hummingbirds, document medicinal plants and the knowledge that surrounds them, and partner with Indigenous communities like Chirikyacu, where the forest is held as kin. Few field stations put a working city, a protected mountain range, and this much biodiversity within reach of the same balcony.
Camera traps in Chirikyacu's primary forest and in purma, the regrowth beside it, recorded similar mammal diversity in both, a sign the community's land management is working.
Students traced Chirikyacu's culture and the forces changing it, then asked what tourism has added. The community's answer: real benefit, and a reason to hold on to both culture and land.
A student proposed the topic and ran the interviews in Spanish, cataloging the many plants the Chirikyacu community heals with and putting both a cultural and an economic value on each.
Fruit bats carry the seeds that replant a cleared field. Students followed them across Chirikyacu's gradient from garden plot to old growth, adding to the center's growing bat record.
Students live in shared cabins on the center's two-acre campus, eat communal meals six days a week, and have Sundays free to cook and explore. Tarapoto sits just beyond the gate: a small city in the forest where students walk to cafés and markets, practice their Spanish, and meet the urban culture of the Peruvian jungle.
Free hours belong to the campus and its neighbors: bird species identified from the balcony, monkeys on their daily pass through the canopy, and a walking trail into the conservation area next door. When the program does leave, for a riverboat on the Amazon or the high Andes, campus life packs up and travels with it.
Enrolling now for Spring 2027, Summer 2027, and Fall 2027.
