Richard Bracken Artist

In April 2008 I was awarded a travel scholarship to Las Cuevas Research Station in Belize by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. Scientists from universities such as Oxford, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh UCLA, Virginia Tech and Belize use Las Cuevas year-round.

The four weeks spent at Las Cuevas allowed me to understand the different ways in which scientists conduct their varied research in the field. It struck me that fieldwork is not always a pleasant or easy task. For many of the researchers it means hard work and long hours employing quite low-fi methods. The nature of the rainforest environment can also add to the difficulty of certain tasks. However, out of these basic methods and collections of raw data comes, after analysis and interpretation, a much clearer image of that particular facet of the rainforest's ecology, which in turn contributes to our understanding of that environment as a whole.