Bob Taylor met Tom Smith, director of UCLA’s Congo Basin Institute, who had worked in Cameroon for decades and knew as much about its forest ecology as Taylor knew about guitars. They found themselves circling a shared quandary: The urgent need to regrow tropical hardwoods in the Congo Basin was hampered because scientists knew more...

UCLA’s Tom Smith spoke with CBS about a new United Nations report that says nature is essential for our existence and a good quality of life, but point to a stark warning: humans are transforming the planet’s natural habitat at an unprecedented rate. Jonathan Vigliotti reports.

Thomas Smith is the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research and co-executive director of the Congo Basin Institute. He presented on his work and experience in the Congo Basin. 

UCLA operates multiple tropical research facilities in Central Africa through its Congo Basin Institute, a partnership with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.  In this Foreign Service Journal article, the founder of Taylor Guitars describes the partnership between Taylor Guitars and the Congo Basin Institute “to grow ebony seedlings, and developed a mechanism to make...

Researchers in the UCLA Congo Basin Institute and Center for Tropical Research are using genomic tools to track down the global trafficking routes of pangolins and their scales.

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.