Abstract:
Dry forest is the most endangered of the once widespread
habitat types in Mesoamericai today only 0,08 percent of the
original 550,000 km 2 is in preserves. This document describes
and discusses an $ l l .8 million project in northwestern Costa Rica
that will allow the dry forest organisms in Santa Rosa National Park
and on the evergreen-forested slopes of two nearby volcanos to reoccupy
the adjacent low-quality agricultural and pasture land. Simultaneously
this project in tropical restoration ecology will have a
management focus designed to integrate the park itself, Guanacaste
National Parle, into Costa Rican local and national society as a
major new cultural resource in an area that is agriculturally rich but
culturally deprived. The 700 km2 park will be large enough to
maintain healthy populations of all animals, plants and habitats that
are known to have originally occupied the site, and to contain
enough habitat replication to allow intensive use of some areas by
visitors and researchers. The biological technology for restoring a
large area of species-rich and habitat-rich tropical dry forest is
primarily fire control by managers, grass control by cattle, and tree
seed dispersal by wild and domestic animals (and as budgets permit,
intensive reforestation programs with native trees); this restoration
biology is already relatively well understood or currently being subjected
to field experiments. The sociological technology for integration
of the park into Costa Rican society is straightforward education
of students and teachers at all ages and levels in the society,
and research on the biology of the park to obtain more information
to feed that education process. In addition to being a major cultural
resource, the park will have a variety of economic values such as
gene and seed banks for dry forest plants and animals, watershed
protection, reforestation examples and technology, ecotourism, and
conventional tourism. The land to be incorporated in Guanacaste
National Park is almost entirely owned as investment property by
people willing to sell it for a fair market price; $8.8 million is needed
for this purpose (S200 per ha, $81 per acre). A park that will
survive into perpetuity and display its cultural potential must have a
substantial endowment for technical and cultural management; a
minimum endowment of $3 million is needed for this purpose (an
operating budget of $300 000 per year). The entire project must be
in place by 1990, and about $1 million is needed immediately to
secure the habitats that are in danger of immediate destruction.
