But nowhere are the changes more apparent than along the Chagres River itself, dammed in 1913 to form Gatun Lake, as part of the Panama Canal project.

BBC: In search of pirates in Panama

Using a bottom-up approach to his research, as opposed to Mr McCullough's top-down method of looking at the project through a geopolitical prism, Mr Parker has written the Panama story for a new generation.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal

Ortega's forces are dredging the river as part of an Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Why Latin America turned

Among the approved projects is also a Regional Project, submitted by El Salvador with the support of Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama, for the development of an athlete outreach programme in the context of Youth Games which will be held in the region in 2011.

UNESCO: MEDIA SERVICES

Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand, de Lesseps was determined, without having set foot in Panama and after only the vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through the mountainous central American isthmus would also be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to cope with changes in altitude.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal

"We are just starting to understand the ripple down effects and the repercussions of losing amphibians, " said Jamie Voyles, a biologist at New Mexico Tech in Albuquerque and one of the principal investigators of Project Atelopus, an effort to study and protect frogs of an endangered genus in Panama.

NPR: Alarm Over Vanishing Frogs In The Caribbean