Gary Hartshorn: the Love of a Tropical Biologist

La Selva is truly home to OTS Executive Director Gary Hartshorn. Ever since he first set eyes on the tropical forest he has felt a spiritual resonance with the lush landscape of vine-swathed trees and verdant foliage.

"I just became immediately enamored with La Selva," he says. "There were these beautifully buttressed trees festooned with epiphytes. The forest just captured me." As a biologist, he says, he found the rainforest particularly intriguing -- a treasure trove of scientific secrets.

However, La Selva itself did not provide Hartshorn his first initiation into the tropics. His love affair with La Selva began with a dalliance in 1966, when as an "impressionable young graduate student" he took a tropical ecology course in another part of Costa Rica. Earning his master's degree and already smitten, he decided to do his doctoral work at the University of Washington because it offered a chance to work in Costa Rica.

"Three weeks after I applied to do my doctorate at the University of Washington, I was invited by course coordinators of the same course I had taken the previous year to come back as a resource faculty; which is kind of crazy for a graduate student to be invited back as a resource faculty person,” he recalls. His initial three-week stay in Costa Rica stretched into three months, as he took a tree identification course that brought him for the first time to La Selva.

Captivated by the research station, he did his doctoral research at La Selva, and immediately after receiving his Ph.D. -- one of the first done at La Selva -- he proposed further research on the puzzle of “tree gaps” in the tropical forest.
“There was this dogma about tropical forests being stable, ancient places,” he recalls. “But when I was staying in the River Station at La Selva, every couple of weeks, I’d hear this creak and crack and a big tree would go crashing down. And walking the trails every day, I’d see frequent tree falls. And I thought ‘How can this be? This forest is falling down around me?’”

So, immediately after he finished defending his thesis at the University of Washington “we loaded our kids in the van and drove five thousand miles from Seattle to Costa Rica.” He spent three-and-a-half years doing postdoctoral research at La Selva, but hesitated to take an academic position at a U. S. university, “because I felt that the problems were so great facing tropical forests, particularly rain forests that I wanted to work full time on them rather than just summers from a U.S. university and an occasional sabbatical.” Thus, he spent the next years as a consultant on tropical forestry, including a decade as an advisor to the OTS after Duke botanist Don Stone became executive director. To the surprise of his colleagues, he took a job in the late 1980s with the World Wildlife Fund directing its tropical biodiversity support program -- a post he held for more than seven years.
"I got to do work for the WWF in Africa and the tropical Far East,” he said. “And so I stayed connected to the real world of front-line conservation and learned about administration and fund-raising.”
This experience, as well as his deep knowledge of tropical ecology, served him and the OTS extraordinarily well, since he agreed in 1996 to become its executive director.
And his love affair with La Selva continues unabated.