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| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013, Vol. 13, No. 245 | |
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| Page One is HERE! Page 2 is HERE! Page 4 is HERE! | NEXT PAGE |
| For many, today is the last day of the
2013 school term |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Today is the day that public school youngsters have been awaiting since last February. Today is the last day of the school term. Homework and tests are over and done. Today is a day for a party and various events, depending on the school. Today also means that parents will have to make additional arrangements to care for their children. A possibility is with the many vacation activities that private and public institutions plan. The Museo Nacional already has an event scheduled for Thursday. The Museo de los Niños said Tuesday that it was accepting signups for its Desafío de Campeones of "challenge of champions." The program contains a series of week-long events in January. Parents might be pleased to know that they have an option to place a child from 7:30 A.M. to 5 p.m. That would be a good option for working parents. The week programs are set up as adventure games with various challenges for the young participants. Some 30 staffers will take care of the youngsters, the museum said. |
 Museo de los Niños photo
The children's museum sent this
photo to promote its vacation events for youngsters. But it sure fits
with the end of the school term. |
Woody vines known as lianas continue to overgrow trees in the forests of the American tropics |
 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
photo
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| Tropical spread of vines attributed to
colonization from above |
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By the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Woody vines known as lianas continue to overgrow trees in the forests of the American tropics. Perhaps their ability to clone themselves by taking root at new sites far from their original roots explains how they gain the upper hand, according to a new report by ecologist Suzanne Rutishauser Yorke and colleagues. In 2002, Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds published the first study claiming that vines were becoming more common in the Amazon. The amount of liana leaf litter and the proportion of total leaf litter composed of liana leaves increased significantly between 1986 and 2002 on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island. Joe Wright and Osvaldo Calderon reported that in 2004. They are with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Stefan Schnitzer is a research associate at the institute and |
associate professor at the
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He and his colleagues concluded
in a 2011 paper that vines continued to overgrow trees at eight sites
from Brazil to South Carolina. Now the results are in from a long-term study at La Selva biological station in Costa Rica. They show that liana abundance climbed by 15 percent and diameter by 20 percent in old-growth forests but not in selectively logged forests between 1999 and 2007. Colonization by plants from outside the study plots contributed significantly to the increases as lianas in the tops of fallen trees put down new roots. “We just conducted a follow-up study at La Selva and found that the pace of liana increase from 2007 - 2012 at this site is still high,” said Schnitzer, “And we also found that on BCI, lianas were increasing in density and the number and level of trees infested was on the rise,” he added using the initials for Barro Colorado Island. |
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
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