Rachel Ward investigates tropical forests’ reproductive efforts on Barro Colorado Island, Panama

This summer, second year PhD student Rachel Ward visited research partners at the tropical forest research station on Barro Colorado Island, where she spent her days collecting and processing material from litterfall traps on islands’ 50-hectare forest dynamics plot. The long-running litterfall dataset is central to her Masters project, which probes correlations between tree species’ functional traits and their allocation of energy to reproduction.