LOS AMIGOS BIOLOGICAL STATION
From 2003 to 2008 I was resident director of a field station in a remote region of Amazonian Peru. It was a coincidence, because years before the station was established I'd visited the Los Amigos watershed to survey trees and camped on a beach a couple of kilometers from the terrace that would eventually become my home. It was a wonderful place to live then and it's a wonderful place to do field research now. Up-to-date information on the station is here and aquí.
You can read more about my time at Los Amigos here.
Here are a few of the scientific articles I've written about Los Amigos:
Pitman, N.C.A. 2010. An overview of the Los Amigos watershed, Madre de Dios, southeastern Peru. Unpublished draft.
Pitman, N.C.A., J. Widmer, C.N. Jenkins, G. Stocks, L. Seales, F. Paniagua & E.M. Bruna. 2011. Volume and geographical distribution of ecological research in the Andes and the Amazon, 1995-2008. Tropical Conservation Science 4(1): 64-81.
Pitman, N.C.A., D. Norris, J. Martínez González, E. Torres, F. Pinto, H. Collado, W. Concha, R. Thupa, E. Quispe, J. Pérez & J.C. Flores del Castillo. 2011. Four years of vertebrate monitoring on an upper Amazonian river. Biodiversity and Conservation 20: 827-849.
Pitman, N.C.A. 2010. Research in biodiversity hotspots should be free. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25: 381.
Pitman, N.C.A., M. del C. Loyola Azáldegui, K. Salas, G. Vigo T. & D.A. Lutz. 2009. Historia e impacto de la literatura científica del Departamento de Madre de Dios, Perú, 1553-2004. [History and impact of the scientific literature of the Department of Madre de Dios, Peru.] Revista Peruana de Biología 15(2): 15-22.
Pitman, N.C.A., M. del C. Loyola Azáldegui, K. Salas, G. Vigo T. & D.A. Lutz. 2007. Written accounts of an Amazonian landscape over the last 450 years. Conservation Biology 21(1): 253-262.
Pitman, N.C.A., J. Terborgh, M.R. Silman, P. Núñez V., D.A. Neill, C.E. Cerón, W.A. Palacios & M. Aulestia. 2002. A comparison of tree species diversity in two upper Amazonian forests. Ecology 83(11): 3210-3224.
Pitman, N.C.A., J. Terborgh, M.R. Silman, P. Núñez V., D.A. Neill, C.E. Cerón, W.A. Palacios & M. Aulestia 2001. Dominance and distribution of tree species in upper Amazonian terra firme forests. Ecology 82(8): 2101-2117. [Awarded the 2002 William S. Cooper Award by the Ecological Society of America]
Pitman, N.C.A., J. Terborgh, P. Núñez & M. R. Silman. 2001. Especies arbóreas comunes de la parte baja de Madre de Dios, Perú. Pages 46-52 in Rodríguez, L. O. (ed.), El Manu y otras experiencias de investigación y manejo de bosques neotropicales. Proyecto Aprovechamiento y Manejo Sostenible de la Reserva de Biosfera y Parque Nacional del Manu (Pro-Manu), Lima.
Bagchi, R., V. Swamy, J.-P. Latorre Farfan, J. Terborgh, C. I. A. Vela, N. C. A. Pitman & W. Galiano Sanchez. 2018. Defaunation increases the spatial clustering of lowland Western Amazonian tree communities. Journal of Ecology 2018: 1–13. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.12929
Norris, D., N.C.A. Pitman, J. Martínez González, E. Torres, F. Pinto, H. Collado, W. Concha, R. Thupa, E. Quispe, J. Pérez, and J.C. Flores del Castillo. 2011. Abiotic modulators of Podocnemis unifilis (Testudines: Podocnemididae) abundances in the Peruvian Amazon. Zoologia 28(3): 343-350.
Emmons, L.H., P. Chatelet, L. Cournac, N.C.A. Pitman, V. Vilca V., L.F. del Aguila & M.A. Dubois. 2006. Seasonal change in leaf-area index at three sites along a South American latitudinal gradient. Ecotropica 12: 87-102.
Photo by Frances Buerkens