title: Ark and Archive: Making a Place for Long-Term Research on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.
abstract: Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, may be the most studied tropical forest in the world. A 1,560-hectare island created by the flooding of the Panama Canal, BCI became a nature reserve and biological research station in 1923. Contemporaries saw the island as an "ark" preserving a sample of primeval tropical nature for scientific study. BCI was not simply "set aside," however. The project of making it a place for science significantly reshaped the island through the twentieth century. This essay demonstrates that BCI was constructed specifically to allow long-term observation of tropical organisms--their complex behaviors, life histories, population dynamics, and changing species composition. An evolving system of monitoring and information technology transformed the island into a living scientific "archive," in which the landscape became both an object and a repository of scientific knowledge. As a research site, BCI enabled a long-term, place-based form of collective empiricism, focused on the study of the ecology of a single tropical island. This essay articulates tropical ecology as a "science of the archive" in order to examine the origins of practices of environmental surveillance that have become central to debates about global change and conservation.
authors.forename: Megan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Raby
mesh_terms: D004463:Ecology / Q000266:history* / Q000458:organization & administration; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D019021:Natural History / Q000266:history*; D010176:Panama; D012106:Research / Q000266:history* / Q000458:organization & administration; D014329:Tropical Climate