Enhancing infrastructure for multidisciplinary, long-term research at the Karisoke Research Center, Rwanda

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The Karisoke Research Center (KRC) in Rwanda (www.gorillafund.org) is the world's largest and longest running continuous field site for studying gorillas in the wild. Data collected at Karisoke has contributed to nearly 300 scientific publications on gorillas and the surrounding region on topics ranging from socioecology, life history, paternal and maternal investment, ontogeny, physiology, health, feeding ecology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. Over the past five years, 47 researchers from 17 universities, including undergraduate, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, have also conducted research at Karisoke and data from Karisoke has been used in collaborations with more than 40 institutions. Despite the long-term success of Karisoke as a research site, its facilities are not currently adequate to support this range of inquiry and demonstrate the limitations of ad hoc field facilities. Particularly, the laboratory and herbarium are desperately in need of refurbishment. These facilities lack adequate sanitation, ventilation, and the organizational capacity to store samples. This improvement project will provide the infrastructure needed for broad interdisciplinary research in the fields of endocrinology, genetics, disease ecology, and conservation biology. The primary outcomes will be an improved laboratory facility to advance innovative, interdisciplinary research, and a high-functioning herbarium, including a digital archive, to aid national and global collaborative research to better understand the increasing changes to the region's flora. In addition, improvements to these facilities will be utilized by visiting researchers around the world, as well as by host-country researchers (undergraduate and graduate students, and scientists), where there is a great need for next generation scientists. The need for a modern Karisoke laboratory facility has been growing over the past 15 years and has become acute in the last five years as vast developments in new lab techniques and a need for increasingly interdisciplinary research has emerged. To improve working conditions for laboratory staff and visiting researchers, and to meet international laboratory standards, multiple laboratory workspace upgrades are needed for processing and preserving fecal samples for hormones (metabolites), particle size, isotope, microbiome analysis, and molecular work, and or parasitological analyses and phytolite studies, which require up-to-date imaging microscopes. Additional improvements include installing exhume hood exhaust systems along with refrigeration units and storage for samples. The KRC herbarium will be reconstructed into a biological sample storage room with state of the art storage and climate control measures. A drying preservation stage will be installed in a separate room to reduce the risk of contamination. These improvements will make the collection of plant species more sustainable, accessible, and usable to visiting researchers to study the diverse Virunga massif vegetation, and will allow for the expansion of the plant collection (and potentially other voucher collections). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.