In my first Journal, I told you a little about what it’s like to live and work in the Amazon— a typical day in the rainforest. Now I’m going to tell you a bit more about our research here.

I’m in charge of two field teams (each with three persons) that spend up to two hundred days each year living and working in the rainforest. We are trying to learn how the fragmentation of the forest affects trees and other plants. That may sound a little boring, but believe me, it’s not.

The field work is challenging. In order to study the trees, we first have to identify them. So far we have found over a thousand species of trees in our study area. Some of these species are new to science, so they don’t even have a scientific name yet. And many of the trees are very, very similar in appearance. It takes years of practice to learn how to tell all the different species apart.