50 Years of Tropical Research | San Diego Zoo 100

For 50 years, staff at Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru have been working to help protect the irreplaceable ecosystem of Peru’s Manu National Park, a landscape critical for sustaining global biodiversity and preventing mass extinction. The 4.2 million-acre national park in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon encompasses the entire Manu River watershed from the Andes mountains to the lowland Amazonian rain forest. Considered to be one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet, Manu National Park is recognized as a World Heritage Site and is protected as one of the most biodiverse lowland tropical forests in the world. For over three decades, the field station was operated under the auspices of the Peruvian government by John Terborgh, professor of environmental science at Duke University. Cocha Cashu is now jointly managed by SERNANP and San Diego Zoo Global, with the shared goal of maintaining the station’s legacy as a premier site for tropical research, while also expanding the station’s mission to build conservation capacity in Peru, better integrate local communities and wider society, and address Manu Park management objectives and conservation priorities.

Teeming with biological diversity, Cocha Cashu is a tropical treasure. There is a price for the privilege of studying there, however. The main one is access: you must spend a day on a dirt road and a couple more days on boats to get there. But the journey is spectacular!

Researchers and students come to Cocha Cashu and fall in love with tropical nature. There is no better place to see it up close and personal than at this spectacular reserve. An annual field course trains about a dozen of Peru’s brightest and most passionate college students in the techniques and applications of field ecology and conservation. They will go on to become the conservation practitioners, government authorities, and professors who help define conservation in the coming generations.

The Cocha Cashu Biological Station is located in Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon, which harbors some of the most diverse plant and animal life anywhere. In a single hectare, you may find well over 100 species of trees. More than 1,000 species of birds live here, along with more than a dozen species of primates, like the spider monkey seen here. Set up a trail camera overnight, and you may see jaguars, pumas, ocelots, jaguarundis, tapirs, short-eared dogs, anteaters, and so much more.

2019

Integration 2017 - 2026

50 Years of Tropical Research: 2019 was the 50th anniversary of Cocha Cashu, SDZG’s biological field station in Peru.

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