Intro

I am excited (though a little hesitant) to announce that I will be keeping a blog of my experiences in South America! I will not follow any sort of schedule for updating this thing. Instead, I will put things up when I it makes sense to.

As you may already know I am slated to spend a couple weeks chasing frogs in the high Andes of Peru, followed by a month-long stint looking for all reptiles and amphibians at the Los Amigos Biological Station (CICRA) in the Peruvian Amazon. Fortunately those two experiences might not be where my adventure ends... My generous supervisor from my most recent job, Dr. Emily Lemmon (Florida State University) has put me in contact with herpetologists in a few other South American countries. The details for those expeditions have not yet been finalized, but the leads are promising. Prior to all of the field expeditions I am flying into Lima, and then traveling by bus to some tourist destinations to get in a little vacation time.

Here is some background on why I am going:

1) South America has always been on my radar as a must-visit continent. (along with the rest of them)
2) I want international experience in my field of study: Herpetology
3) The stars aligned and it just seems like the right decision at this time

In the next couple years I would like to start working toward a Master's degree in the field of Herpetology - the study of reptiles and amphibians. I would like to focus my research on helping understand the declines of amphibian species since they are in the most trouble right now. Their declines are due to a wide variety of factors, which I might elaborate on later.

Because I am a also a lover of geography (ahem, biogeography) I will try to include some maps in my blog. I hope you can enjoy what I have to say on here. If not, just look at the maps and pictures. They're more important than the words. I do not claim to be much of a writer, so please bear with me if things get rough!

As a reward for reading to the bottom of my first post I have included a complementary map of my tentative travel plans in Peru:

Check out the Map Directory at StepMap