Sabana Field Research Station

The Sabana Field Research Station is comprised of facilities and specialized equipment that support numerous research programs and projects from domestic and international agencies and institutions. There are several buildings in the station complex (see below), including:

• Administrative building with a conference room
• Laboratory building for wet and dry analyses
• Storage building
• Office buildings for Forest Service scientists and technicians

• Communications and law enforcement offices
• Multipurpose building including office space, laboratory space, oven room, sample preparation room, storage areas, laundry room, and a flammable storage area
• Dormitory building, with restrooms, kitchen, living and balcony areas
• Research offices and mycology laboratory

Multi-purpose Building

The multi-purpose building houses both research and domestic facilities. These include:

• Weighing room with analytical balances
• Sorting room
• Grinding room
• Oven room
• Storage room
• Laundry room with complimentary washers and driers, a wash basin, and an ice machine

Research Equipment

The multi-purpose building IITF manages two weather station towers in the LEF, a 30 feet tower located at East Peak and an 80 feet tower located in the Bisley watersheds. The towers contain the following instrumentation:

• Automated precipitation gauge;
• Pyranometer (solar radiation);
• Licor Quantum (photosynthetic radiation);
• Marine wind vector;
• Wind speed sensor; and
• Temperature and relative humidity sensor.

At each tower, these instruments are connected to a micrologger, from which data are downloadable using radio wave frequency receptor/transmitter in 900 MHZ and via cell phone frequency from AT&T.

In addition, there is an automated precipitation gauge that measures rainfall depth and intensity, along with temperature, and a ceilometer for measuring cloud base height. At the nearby Bisley watersheds there is an albedometer for measuring diffuse light, and an ozone sensor. There are also temperature, conductivity and water level pressure sensors in three streams.

The Forest Service has a long history of research and management in El Yunque National Forest, dating back to the 1920s with the establishment of large-scale trial plantings with both introduced and native tree species. In the 1930s and 1940s the Institute completed important silvicultural studies with rigorous controls to provide an important basis for tropical forest production. In 1956, El Yunque National Forest was also designated as the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF), and a forest management plan was developed that prescribed active management of natural stands and the development of plantations.

Photo Credit

Preton Keres

In the 1960s the ecology of unmanaged forests was begun in earnest via long-term ecosystem studies, and experimental research about the fundamental structure and function of tropical forest ecosystems and metabolic processes in response to radiation disturbance. Ecological research strengthened during the 1980s with the establishment of the LEF as a National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program site, and the expansion into topics such as carbon and nutrient dynamics, trophic interactions, and the forcing effects of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic disturbances.

In more recent decades, watershed and landscape perspectives have been added to the research agenda, assessing the effects of climate change and land use/land cover change on tropical ecosystems and their biodiversity, and quantifying ecosystem goods and services from novel forest communities and integrated social-ecological systems. Establishment of the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory has focused research attention investigating processes in Earth’s permeable near-surface layer, from the land-atmosphere interface to the bottom of the groundwater, where rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms interact.

The Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Program (LUQ-LTER)