Long-Term Wildlife Monitoring Internship

We are a non-profit organisation whose mission is to preserve the Osa Peninsula’s globally significant biodiversity through research; conservation and education.

The long-term wildlife conservation interns will:

• Train in tree climbing techniques to assist the team in the installation; maintenance and monitoring of different arboreal bridge designs above roads to connect patches of fragmented forest to increase arboreal wildlife movements and reduce roadkill events.
• Participate in the execution of long-term camera trap monitoring utilizing Wildlife Insights on OC properties to track wildlife movement and distributions across years
• Support the wildlife monitoring efforts of the Ridge to Reef Restoration Initiative; establishing and executing a long-term monitoring plan to assess restoration success on farms across the landscape ensuring forest connectivity for wildlife movement from the Osa Peninsula up to La Amistad International Park. Dung beetles; birds; and mammals will be used as target groups to monitor forest recovery success
• Assist  the wildlife and outreach team to host workshops with communities from the Osa Peninsula and surrounding highlands in southern Costa Rica to train participants  in the use of the citizen science app -iNaturalist; to create a region-wide monitoring network – the Osa Biodiversity Survey (OBS) and newly launched Amistosa Biodiversity Survey (ABS)
• Manage GSM cameras for real time monitoring wildlife on Osa Conservation properties and feed the information into Earth Ranger – an app specially developed for monitoring protected areas
• Trained in acoustic annotation and assessment by OC’s wildlife acoustics research fellow to assist in annotating acoustic data obtained from a Ridge to Reef mega-survey to identify the  presence and absence of focal species; such as the endangered Central American spider monkey; to understand their distribution over an elevational gradient and landscape matrix; and contribute to region-wide and global distribution data and maps
• Participate in monitoring bat boxes installed in our restoration experimental plots to understand how these boxes can help to rewild degraded areas and restore ecological interactions and ecosystem services
• Training in radiotelemetry to study the movement patterns of tapirs and king vultures in the Osa Peninsula.

In addition to the Wildlife program activities; long-term field interns will interact with and build skills alongside Osa Conservation’s wide breadth of programs. You will:

• Release baby sea turtles; monitor nesting mothers; and relocate threatened nests
• Plant and monitor native tree restoration efforts
• Practice regenerative farming techniques to grow sustainable produce
• Develop scientific communication skills and learn to produce cutting-edge stories from one of Earth’s greatest wilderness areas.

If you are interested in this unique field opportunity to develop your scientific and conservation career; please send your CV; cover letter and a 1-minute video explaining why you are the perfect person for this tropical rainforest conservation experience to carolinapinto@osaconservation.org with the email title “Wildlife Monitoring long-term intern” by May 30th; 2022.

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