This expedition was a six‑week student‑led project aimed at investigating biodiversity in eastern Paraguay while gaining cultural and field experience in a country largely unfamiliar to the team. After over a year of planning and fundraising, the group travelled through more than 750 miles of forests, plantations, farmland, and marshes, completing over 350 hours of wildlife observation and ecological surveying. The expedition focused on comparing avian biodiversity across three habitat types: primary Atlantic forest, a managed hardwood plantation, and intensively farmed agricultural land. Birds were used as biodiversity indicators, with observers employing point‑count surveys and recording cumulative encounter times to generate species‑richness curves.
The team’s primary study site, the Florido plantation, proved far more heterogeneous than expected, containing only small, fragmented monoculture stands and extensive secondary forest under varying degrees of human influence. This required the researchers to redefine “plantation” for their study and adapt their methodology under significant time constraints. Surveys in Florido ultimately recorded 178 bird species. In contrast, agricultural land near Santa Rita—dominated by maize, wheat, and soy—yielded only 21 species, indicating a sharp decline in biodiversity associated with intensive farming.
The final study site, the Golondrina estancia, contained over 8,000 hectares of primary Atlantic forest. Surveys here recorded 42 species in roughly 28 hours, with encounter curves suggesting far higher total species richness than either plantation or farmland. Preliminary conclusions indicate that primary forest holds the greatest avian diversity, plantations maintain moderate levels likely due to habitat heterogeneity, and intensive agriculture supports very low diversity.
Beyond scientific findings, the report reflects on cultural experiences in Paraguay—hospitality, poverty, language barriers, and the lifestyle. Despite logistical challenges, limited field time, and methodological constraints, the team concluded that the expedition was successful and foundational for future work.