Welcome Rebecca Cole and OTS’ Tropical Center for Restoration Science
It is with great anticipation and happiness that we welcome Rebecca Cole back to OTS to lead OTS’s Tropical Center for Restoration Science. Rebecca grew up in the Las Cruces neighborhood near San Vito. Her family were some of the early modern settlers of southern Costa Rica and experienced first-hand the transition of a forested frontier to an agricultural landscape. After years away Rebecca returned and was the Director of all OTS’s field stations, working out of Las Cruces Research Station until 2018. During the last seven years, she has focused all her work on research to improve practices and outcomes of tropical forest restoration across Latin America. Along with collaborators, she established the Global Experiments Network (GEN), a group of conservation-focused NGOs contributing their experience to improve forest restoration. She also chaired the science advisory council for Restor, a global platform hosting the restoration community, and is the owner and director of Loma Linda Field Station in southern Costa Rica. Rebecca and her work were featured recently in an episode of NOVA, “Secrets of the Forest,” which focused on how forests are an essential part of climate adaptation and recovery.
The Tropical Center for Restoration Science (TCRS) will serve as a hub of research, education, and capacity-building among many partners across the globe. New knowledge and practice will help increase the scale and efficacy of tropical forest restoration. The TCRS will leverage existing research networks such as the GEN across Latin America, along with a suite of cutting-edge, active research projects already established near Las Cruces and the other OTS stations in Costa Rica and South Africa. These established and new projects will serve to generate knowledge, provide hands-on training opportunities for restoration actors, and help build capacity for improved practices and environmental leadership in the tropics.
Emphasizing applied research that will happen through the Tropical Center for Restoration Science and other such programs like the developing Center for the Urban Tropics is a priority strategy for leading OTS into the middle of the 21st century. Every iteration of the OTS mission statement has included a “so that” element, an aspiration that the pioneering science and educational models developed by OTS will result in positive policy, conservation, or the ability to support diverse tropical ecosystems. There have been many notable successes such as national parks with biological corridors and the appearance of ecosystems services payments in Costa Rica. Now over 60 years of OTS’s research and practice will begin to realize those aspirations in programmatic centers that are carefully designed to achieve measurable results. Even with the challenges of shifting dynamics in higher education and political priorities in the countries we operate in, OTS will make an ever-greater impact. Please help us realize this essential purpose with any financial support you can provide.