Center for Tropical Research

Former CTR graduate student, Emily Curd, and co-authors recently received the cover at Ecosphere for their newly published journal on bacterial diversity’s correlation with soil heterogeneity. Noting that plant and animal diversity generally increases with increasing environmental heterogeneity, Curd tested whether this relationship also holds for bacterial communities in soil. Their results suggest that plant invasions associated with soil...

From SciDev.net: Climate change is reducing plantain yields and school attendance rates in Cameroon from 1991 to 2011, says a study. According to researchers, the Central African region, where Cameroon is located, lacks studies on climate change social impacts. Therefore, researchers assessed temperature trends in Cameroon for the period 1950 to 2013. They also linked the impact...

Twenty years ago, the Center for Tropical Research was founded as a small research unit, dedicated to understanding the biotic processes that underlie and maintain the diversity of life in the tropics, and supporting conservation efforts to protect tropical species and habitats.

Learn about how Kevin Njabo’s journey as a conservation biologist led him to work as a director of the Congo Basin Institute, a UCLA project in Cameroon that works with local communities providing high-level educational opportunities for African scholars to address regional problems such as food insecurity, infectious disease outbreaks and the effects of climate...

CTR Senior Research Fellow Borja Milá, shares footage from a month-long ornithological expedition to the pristine Kumawa Mountains, in West Papua New Guinea. The expedition took place in the fall of 2017 to explore avifauna of the cloud forests. Milá is a research scientist at the Spanish National Research Council’s National Museum of Natural Sciences.

The UCLA African Studies Center invites undergraduate and graduate students to apply for the Judith Boyajian Travel Fellowship.  Spend the summer in Africa The Judith Boyajian Travel Fellowship is designed to promote global citizenship and engagement through a summer working, studying, and living in Africa. The Judith Boyajian Travel Fellowship The Judith Boyajian Travel Fellowship...

“. . . you almost never see a statistical significance that strong. It was compelling,” stated Trevon Fuller, assistant adjunct professor at the Center for Tropical Research to Mongabay in regards to decreasing Cameroonian college attendance rates as a result of decreased plantain yields. Co-authors in Fuller’s lead study include Kevin Njabo and Thomas Smith.

IoES researchers Trevon Fuller, Ryan Harrigan, and Thomas Smith found that Zika and Chikungunya outbreaks generally occur three weeks after heavy rainfall. This study can help health officials prepare for outbreaks approximately one month in advance.