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Article ID: CBB212462214

Ark and Archive: Making a Place for Long-Term Research on Barro Colorado Island, Panama (2015)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 106
Issue: 4
Pages: 798-824
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/684610

DOI: 10.1086/684610

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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.

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