We started off our first official morning here with one of mother nature's alarm clocks... a 4.9 earthquake centered about 30 miles to the west. Sleeping on the top bunk was great, because what woke me up was the swaying of the bed. Apparently I wasn't too concerned, because after Shawn put into words that it was an earthquake, my response was "Oh, okay," and went back to sleep.
The morning was spent in orientation discussing the the scope and objectives of our research project here, including the main methods of our data collection.
For background, Costa Rica has been administering a Payment for Environmental Services Program (PES) since 1997. The main premise of the program is that the government will make preservation, reforestation, and agroforestry a priority by paying landowners to either protect their forest areas or to reforest previously logged areas. The four main goals of this project are watershed protection, biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, and protection of the country's scenic beauty. Funding for this program flows into the government from fuel taxes, and the government gives the money to NGOs to administer on the ground. Money from the NGOs goes to landowners and to the technicians the NGOs commission to determine program eligibility, land rights, etc.
Starting in 2006, it became clear to the Costa Rican government that the plan needed to have greater focus in order to be more efficient. According, they began focusing PES funds on creating and maintaining Biological Corridors, privately owned areas that serve as buffer zones between nationally protected areas.
Keeping that background in mind, there two primary objectives of the research project in progress at the Soltis Center:
- determining if the PES policies favorably influence land use in the biological corridors by creating additional forested habitat, specifically, the project is focused on the Paso de las Nubes Biological Corridor, in which the Soltis Center is located.
- determining if medium to large mammals are utilizing the corridors
The three methods for determining the efficacy of PES projects involve vegetation plots, hair traps, and game camera traps, and interviews with landowners or land managers/occupants.
Using the data gathered from these sources, the project aims to determine the efficacy of the corridors, create a dispersal resistance map showing species occupancy data, and developing landscape modeling projections showing relationships between cost values and biodiversity values.
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