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Instructor
Dr. Jason Bradford is a researcher for the Missouri Botanical Garden and is the primary developer of the course. He has spent most of his research career studying tropical cloud forests around the world and is currently working on a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to integrate studies of biodiversity and climate in cloud forests in the Peruvian Andes.
Past Participants
Dr. Miles Silman is an ecology professor at Wake Forest 
University. His research takes him to Andean cloud forests, where he makes quanitative surveys of the species composition of forests. He has NSF funded projects in Peru to study the how forests differ across geographic space.
Dr. Mark Bush is a biology professor at Florida Institute of Technology. He has several NSF funded projects, including  studies of the history of vegetation change in the Andes and Amazon using records of pollen from lake sediments. These data are compared to inferences of historical climate to understand past and possible future correlated changes between climate and vegetation.
Dr. Peter Møller Jørgensen is a researcher for the Missouri 
Botanical Garden and is an expert on the plant diversity of the Andes. His past work includes a catalogue of the plants of Ecuador and analyses of biodiversity patterns and endangered species. Currently, he is in charge of a NSF funded project to collect and identify plants in Madidi National Park, Bolivia. Madidi stretches from alpine glaciers to lowland Amazonian forest and is home to as many species of plants as in all of North America. |
