The Amazon Burning - Kids and Bugs to the Rescue!

Dear Amazon Champion,

We are in the middle of the rainy season here in the Peruvian Amazon, which is excellent for the plants. Everything is bright green, and we love seeing so much life around our research station!

As it happens at the beginning of every year, we welcomed a new group of Peruvian undergraduate students participating in our Research Residency program. This fully funded and highly competitive 10-week program receives applications from all over the country. This year’s awardees are from the Cusco, Arequipa, and Lima regions. We are very proud of the results this program has brought over the years and can’t wait to see the progress of these three fantastic new students during their time with us.

On the education front, the year's initial months have been devoted to our work with local undergraduate students. As we shared in our previous report, one of the aspects of this year's education project involves training and developing independent research projects with local undergraduate students. In this journey, our participants are discovering and using the scientific method by connecting with the scientific community in the region. So far, some of the activities have included a 5-day retreat to learn how to do research, as well as training sessions and shadowing in the soil lab in partnership with the Madre de Dios University (our most important local school). The students have almost completed their research proposal, and we hope the next few months will be used to complete their projects in total. This is our first direct experience working with local undergraduate students with this approach; we are learning a lot from it!

Thank you for your constant support of our cause; we couldn’t do it without you!

In solidarity,

The ASA family