Project Update: June 2008

During the field work I was in different oak populations of Boyacá and Santander in the eastern mountain range of Colombia. The high hills were a constant to get to the forests since, although oaks distribution is between 1500 to 3300 meters high, the forest have been marginalized to spaces with difficult access.

There where oak forests fully dominated by oaks and other with more plant diversity. Also, anthropogenic fragmentation (livestock principally) is evident in all the places. The more fragmented populations are in the southern part of the Guantiva - La Rusia – Iguaque "conservation corridor" populations in Arcabuco, Gachantiva, and Oiba.

Actually, I am doing the laboratory part of the project in the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) into the laboratory of the Institute of Biological researches Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH) where by now I am extracting DNA.