Raby Megan
Isis. 2015 Dec;106(4):798-824. doi: 10.1086/684610.
Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, may be the most studied tropical forest in the world. A 1,560-hectare island created by the flooding of the Panama Canal, BCI became a nature reserve and biological research station in 1923. Contemporaries saw the island as an "ark" preserving a sample of primeval tropical nature for scientific study. BCI was not simply "set aside," however. The project of making it a place for science significantly reshaped the island through the twentieth century. This essay demonstrates that BCI was constructed specifically to allow long-term observation of tropical organisms--their complex behaviors, life histories, population dynamics, and changing species composition. An evolving system of monitoring and information technology transformed the island into a living scientific "archive," in which the landscape became both an object and a repository of scientific knowledge. As a research site, BCI enabled a long-term, place-based form of collective empiricism, focused on the study of the ecology of a single tropical island. This essay articulates tropical ecology as a "science of the archive" in order to examine the origins of practices of environmental surveillance that have become central to debates about global change and conservation.
巴拿马的巴罗科罗拉多岛（BCI）可能是世界上研究最多的热带森林。BCI是一个由巴拿马运河洪水形成的1560公顷的岛屿，于1923年成为自然保护区和生物研究站。同时代的人将该岛视为一个“方舟”，为科学研究保存原始热带自然的样本。然而，BCI并非简单地“被搁置”。在20世纪，将其打造成为一个科学之地的项目显著地重塑了该岛。本文表明，BCI的建设是专门为了能够对热带生物进行长期观察——观察它们复杂的行为、生活史、种群动态以及不断变化的物种组成。一个不断发展的监测和信息技术系统将该岛转变为一个活生生的科学“档案库”，在这个档案库中，景观既是科学知识的对象，也是其储存库。作为一个研究地点，BCI促成了一种基于地点的长期集体经验主义形式，专注于对单个热带岛屿生态的研究。本文将热带生态学阐述为一种“档案科学”，以便审视环境监测实践的起源，这些实践已成为有关全球变化和保护辩论的核心。
