When Ariadna Mondragón Botero arrived in southern Madagascar to work with lemurs, she immediately became fascinated by the unique nature of the dry forest in the area.
A graduate student in the College of Biological Sciences, she had studied rainforests in her home country, Colombia, but not its dry forests. These ecosystems, unlike rainforests, have a single wet season, and the trees often shed their leaves to survive the dry season droughts. In Madagascar’s dry forests, Mondragón Botero found a wealth of the diversity that she loves—with the possible exception of their “spiny thickets.”
“I was also struck with how threatened and understudied the dry forests were, not only in Madagascar, but all over the world,” she notes.
As a student of biodiversity, Mondragón Botero observes both the differences among the components of her study systems and their patterns and commonalities. And she views human cultures similarly.
