Connection with Barbilla National Park another important step closer!
Despite uncertain economic times and the impact of Corona, the Foundation has some fantastic news to report. Over the past few months, we had to pull out all the stops and negotiate hard to acquire an important piece of land. And we succeeded! We were able to expand the reserve by 65 hectares, or 650,000 square meters!
Forty hectares of this is a piece of beautiful rainforest that directly connects to the existing reserve. The 25 hectares that remain is now pasture land, but is an important connection to the Barbilla National Park. We plan to reforest these 25 hectares of meadows early next year. We will be happy to tell you more about this later.
Why is the connection with the national park so important?
Buffer Zone
Adopt Rainforest has a mission to protect 2,000 hectares of rainforest. This 2000-hectare area acts as an important buffer to both the nearby Barbilla National Park and the Cabécar Indigenous Reserve. Pressure on the rainforest is quite noticeable in this region. Deforestation is evident. From the inhabited world, it is moving further and further toward the National Park and the Indigenous Reserve. Adopt Rainforest wants to ensure that both the National Park and the Indigenous Reserve remain untouched. So that animals, such as the Jaguar, for example, can continue to exist here carefree.
Ecological connection
In addition, it is an important area because it is part of an ecological connecting zone from the North to the South of Costa Rica. As long as this important connecting zone is maintained or even expanded, plants and animals can more easily migrate from North to South without major obstacles.
The map to the right clearly shows how this ecological connecting zone runs. It is also clearly visible that the zone in the area of Adopteer Regenwoud is vulnerable. In fact, the strip here is very narrow. By purchasing and protecting more rainforest in this region, the foundation provides a wider connectivity zone which reduces the vulnerability.
Contiguous forest
It is important to the foundation that the reserve consist of a contiguous piece of forest. It wants to ensure that animals can move freely throughout the area. Animals avoid pastures to move across. This is because of the risks it poses due to little shelter. These same animals are also the ones to disperse the seeds of trees and plants. Almost all seed dispersal in the rainforest is done by animals. So the foundation’s preference is always to select a new plot to be purchased that has rainforest on it and is directly adjacent to the existing reserve.
Reforestation
However, Foundation Adopteer Regenwoud cannot escape the occasional need to purchase a plot where part of the plot has been deforested in the past. In the region where the foundation protects rainforest, forest plots are fragmented by small-scale agriculture and cattle ranching. Thus, there may be a strip of grassland between the current reserve and a new piece of rainforest to be purchased. To ensure that the reserve remains a continuous forest, the foundation is planting a mix of tree species there. This will create a young forest in a period of 5 to 10 years where animals will dare to cross again.
In recent years, the reserve of the Adopt Rainforest Foundation has been easy for project manager Maarten to oversee. Two or three times a week he and the students make his rounds through the project area for the biodiversity research. For this research they visit several plots of the area, giving them a good insight into what is happening. Should any illegal logging occur, it is immediately noticed. The same goes for illegal hunting. In addition to the local presence, camera traps are hung at various places in the reserve. These are checked weekly. Should hunters or poachers walk through our reserve, this is quickly noticed.
In Costa Rica, you can’t ignore them: the Oophaga pumilio. Pumilio means dwarf, and although they are barely 3 cm tall, it is hard to miss the poisonous strawberry frogs. In English, they are called Strawberry Poison Dart frogs because indigenous peoples used to use their poison to makepoison darts. They are also affectionately called the “blue jeans frog,” because they often look like red frogs in jeans. Although they are by no means all the same colors. There are some that are completely red or blue, rather yellow, green or orange, or with black stripes or dots. In total, there are some 15 to 30 color variations.
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What is deforestation anyway? This term is used to describe the process by which trees give way to agriculture and livestock. Deforestation takes place in large numbers every day, especially in the Amazon rainforest. Not a pretty thing! The consequences? Cutting down trees not only means loss of our beautiful nature and biodiversity. It has an effect on the ambient temperature: it rises. This increase is caused by burning trees and because oxygen (O2) gives way to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Trees store a lot of CO2 and this is released during deforestation. The numbers? Don’t be alarmed: around 13 million hectares of forest disappear on Earth every year, according to the FAO. To make it a little more tangible: this equals 18,207,280 football fields. Approximately 34 soccer fields per second! (more…)
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In July we told about the expansion of Adopt Rainforest’s reserve through the purchase of 48.5 acres of land. This parcel is very important because it forms a land bridge between the foundation’s current reserve and Barbilla National Park. Much of the new plot is existing forest, but there are also several acres of pasture […]
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Ecological connection