Biodiversity Conservation in Costa Rica: Learning the Lessons in a Seasonal Dry Forest

Preface

PREFACE The idea of producing this book resulted from several realizations for the editors in 1997. The first was an awareness that a large body of biological research from major regions of Costa Rica was available in the literature. In particular, extensive research had been carried out on the lowland Atlantic wet forest, the middle elevation cloud forest (1,400–1,800 m), and the lowland Pacific dry forest over a period of about 30 years. Further, the wet forest had just received a comprehensive biological review by McDade et al. (1994), and a biological review of the cloud forest was in progress (see later in this preface). Second, from the 1980s onward, many biologists and nonbiologists made enormous human and financial investments to protect biodiversity in all parts of the country, using modern conservation approaches and methods. Despite these efforts, little attention had been paid to assessing effectiveness of their work. Finally, in the more than 30 years that had passed since the first national parks and reserves were established in Costa Rica, including the dry-forest area, there had been no comprehensive assessments of whether these designated areas had been effective in protecting biodiversity. We decided to focus on the seasonal dry forest in the northwestern region of the country because it lacked a review comparable to that of the lowland wet and cloud forests of Costa Rica. Furthermore, this type of forest was rapidly disappearing , in large part because it was so easily converted to agriculture. Daniel Janzen estimated that only 2 percent of the original Middle American tropical dry forest remained. Building on extensive biological knowledge and modern trends for conserving biodiversity, we determined that the book should address three main questions: What do we know about the biodiversity and status of the most prominent groups of plants and animals in the dry forest? What have we learned biologically, socioeconomically , and politically about conserving these specific groups? What do we need to vii consider and do in the future to ensure improved conservation and protection of all biodiversity in the dry forest, as well as other major regions of the country? Several major publications have influenced our thinking in developing the conceptual goals for the book. One of the first workers to investigate Costa Rican life zones was Leslie R. Holdridge of the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica. Over a period of several years, he and his colleagues intensively studied many plant formations and their environmental determinants. This work established an ecological foundation that eventually led to a lengthy treatise on the life zone system (Holdridge et al. 1971). Daniel H. Janzen (1983) and numerous invited colleagues prepared an overview of the natural history of the country. His classic 1983 volume and its later Spanish translation (1991) also provided extensive lists of the plant and animal diversity found in several selected life zones countrywide. More recently, in the 1990s, large scientific publications focused on compiling ecological papers from major life zones that have received extensive study. For example, McDade et al. (1994) presented a large series of edited papers on the ecology and natural history of a lowland Atlantic wet forest, La Selva. This is the site where researchers associated with the Organization for Tropical Studies first began to study the biota intensively, in 1968; research at La Selva has continued since that time. Nadkarni and Wheelwright (2000) published a dozen edited papers on the natural history and ecology of the Monteverde Cloud Forest and its several life zones. In addition, their book offers a limited view of conservation issues. A publication by Bullock et al. (1995) on the seasonal dry tropical forests of the world also influenced the development of the current volume . Most papers in the Bullock volume are concerned with botanical information, with only limited coverage of the fauna. Further, there is surprisingly little mention of conserving biodiversity in any of the examined forests (Frankie 1997). In the current volume we chose to focus on the lowland seasonal dry-forest region of Costa Rica, which includes several related life zones, according to Holdridge et al. (1971). The book represents the first effort to treat comprehensively the findings from a wide variety of plant and animal biologists investigating a highly seasonal tropical environment. We were also interested in whether modern principles of conservation biology had been put into practice to study and conserve dry-forest biodiversity. Thus, we asked the biological contributors to assess the status of the...