Forest Ecology: Perspectives from the South

The Faculty of Biological Sciences is the Academic Unit responsible for advancing biological sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. To this end, the Faculty conducts original scientific research, translates these findings into innovation, and teaches the discipline at both basic and advanced levels. More than 40 years after its founding, our Faculty maintains an intense, diverse, and excellent research and educational activity, which has positioned it as an institution of recognized prestige, both within the University and in the national and international scientific community.

Currently, the Faculty of Biological Sciences trains over 600 undergraduate students in its own programs, distributed across Biology, Biochemistry, and Marine Biology. Additionally, it serves an average of 4,052 undergraduate students from other programs annually, whose training requires biological education. At the advanced education level, since 1970, this Faculty has offered one of the oldest Doctoral Programs.

The Senda Darwin Biological Station (EBSD) was named in honor of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who during his journey in 1834 through the Chiloé archipelago passed through the area where the Station is now located. It was founded in 1996 by a group of researchers led by Juan Armesto and Mary Wilson, and today is managed by the Senda Darwin Foundation with the support of the IEB. It also forms part of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s network of regional centers.

The Senda Darwin Biological Station is a privately owned protected area covering 113 hectares and encompassing grassland, matorral and temperate rainforest, and serves as a base for scientific research, environmental education and conservation. In the words of Charles Darwin, this tangled rainforest dominated a large part of the landscape of Chiloé some 200 years ago. Senda Darwin is currently home to the two most important and biologically diverse types of native evergreen rainforest: The Valdivian forest and the North Patagonian forest, but it also contains grassland, peatlands, matorral, tepual forests, Pilgerodendron cypress forests and rivers, representing the diverse range of the Chiloé archipelago’s continental ecosystems.

Common native animals and plants can be seen and studied here, such as the monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides), Darwin’s frog (Rhinoderma darwinii), Darwin’s fox (Lycalopex fulvipes), the coigüe de Chiloé (Nothofagus nitida) and beautiful red flowering climbers such as the Chilean pitcher flower (Sarmienta scandens), the estrellita (Asteranthera ovata) and the Chilean mitre flower (Mitraria coccinea).

Location: Chiloé Island, District of Ancud, Los Lagos Region.