The Fray Jorge Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research site (LTSER) is NSF-funded and one of the longest running, continuous drylands research programs in the world. Located in Bosque Fray Jorge National Park, Coquimbo District, Chile, the Fray Jorge LTSER started in 1989, is still active, and has become a sentinel site for monitoring effects of resource variability, climate change, and extreme climatic events on diverse groups including plants, small mammals, and their predators, and more recently arthropods and songbirds. Initially spearheaded by Dr. Peter Meserve (now retired), it is now coordinated by Dr. Douglas Kelt in our department. In 2005, our curator Andy Engilis helped design and start avian surveys and monitoring in Fray Jorge, which have been maintained primarily by trained Chilean staff at Fray Jorge for 15 years. The goal was to assess abiotic influences on birds in the park. 

In 2008, Engilis and Kelt recognized the need to develop methods to assess avian productivity for potential future research. The Museum collaborated with the Institute for Bird Populations (Peter Pyle) and launched research to develop a banding manual to properly age and sex Chilean birds in the park; an essential need to provide productivity estimates for birds. Aging and demographic information were not available for South American Birds, and so this was the first project of its kind. Through specimen-based research, Pyle and Engilis examined hundreds of specimens to determine age and sex criteria for the most abundant species of the park, and the team developed the first manual of its kind for South American birds.  Museum researchers tested the manual in the Fray Jorge NP through the 2013 breeding season prior to being published in 2018.  

Chile in NSF Research News