In October and November 1993 Costa Rica and Panama detected indigenous transmission of dengue fever in their territories. The reappearance of the disease in these countries occurred after more than 40 years of absence in Costa Rica and more than 50 years in Panama. Consequently, there are no longer any continental Latin American tropical countries freefrom denguefever. In the last 10years, with...

GPS observations in Costa Rica from 1994-1997 reveal a complex pattern of motion consistent with the superposition of seismic cycle and secular plate margin deformation. In the south, velocity vectors are consistent with motion of the Panama Block plus postseismic deformation following the 1991 Limon earthquake, and interseismic strain due to partial locking of the Middle America Trench (MAT) t...

Background MundoComm is a current NIH-funded project for sustainable public health capacity building in community engagement and technological advances aimed at improving maternal health issues. Two to four teams are selected annually, each consisting of three healthcare professionals and one technical person from specific low and middle income countries (LMICs) including Costa Rica, Dominican ...

OBJECTIVE To compare, along with behavioural habits, the potential atherogenicity of diets in rural and urban areas in Costa Rica. DESIGN Subjects were randomly selected from the general population in Costa Rica. A validated food-frequency questionnaire that inquired about dietary intake in the previous year was administered once to each subject. Each subject provided plasma and an adipose ti...

We used a phylogeographic approach to elucidate the evolutionary history of a lineage of frogs, known as Pristimantis (formerly Eleutherodactylus) ridens (Anura: Brachycephalidae), restricted to the wet forests occurring along the Caribbean versant of isthmian Central America as well as the disjunct wet forest on the Pacific slope of Costa Rica. We placed our phylogeographic study of P. ridens ...

From 1993 to 1997, we observed Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) feeding behavior in Central Pacific Costa Rica. Feeding data acquired in this study were not collected systematically, but opportunistically whenever macaws were observed feeding. To supplement feeding observations, we conducted interviews with local residents. Scarlet Macaws fed on seeds, fruits, leaves, flowers and/or bark of 43 plant s...

Although salamanders are characteristic amphibians in Holarctic temperate habitats, in tropical regions they have diversified evolutionarily only in tropical America. An adaptive radiation centered in Middle America occurred late in the history of a single clade, the supergenus Bolitoglossa (Plethodontidae), and large numbers of species now occur in diverse habitats. Sublineages within this cla...

The use of aquatic macroinvertebrates as bio-indicators in water quality studies has increased considerably over the last decade in Costa Rica, and standard biomonitoring methods have now been formulated at the national level. Nevertheless, questions remain about the effectiveness of different methods of sampling freshwater benthic assemblages, and how sampling intensity may influence biomonito...

David B. Clark, Carlomagno Soto Castro, Luis Diego Alfaro Alvarado and Jane M. Read Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA and La Selva Biological Station, Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquı́, Costa Rica Forest Science Department, School of the Environment, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Department of Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Syracuse, ...