Rincon Rainforest
31 March 2006 news: 1,136+ of you have saved it.
But please read on.
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Rincon Rainforest is 5,600 ha (13,838 acres) along the north edge of the eastern part of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), in northwestern Costa Rica.ACG is about 2% of Costa Rica, the size of New York and all of its suburbs. More at http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr |
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The ACG crosses 9 Life Zones, from the Pacific ocean, mangroves and dry Pacific coastal plain to the cloud forests of the Cordillera Guanacaste (2000 m) to the Atlantic lowland rainforests (200 m).
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The Rincon Rainforest lies along the northern boundary of the wettest and most eastern part of the ACG, from 900 m elevation (old northern boundary of Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieja) down to 200 m (road to Porvenir). |
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31 March 2006 updated.
The 5,600 hectare Rincon Rainforest has been for sale since January 1999 (and well before). As of 31 March 2006, your donations have purchased 98.52% -- 5,517 hectares (13,633 acres), all to be added to Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) as the new Sector Stroud-Wege, when the project is completed. This will occur in 2006-2007. These purchased hectares are the light green area in central part of the lowermost map below (as well as the yellow properties 49 and 50, the completion of the purchase of which is delayed by legal processes beyond our control, but will occur). 1,136 individual donors and hundreds of school children in Sweden, Mexico, Canada and the US have contributed $4,562,559. Every penny has been spent or committed, and only for land purchase (there are no overhead charges by any part of the process - all of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund is pro bono). We could owe $76,000 on one remaining contested property, and those funds are pledged. We have averaged $827/ha ($335/acre) (for 64 properties). Regional land costs are rising rapidly, but the remaining choice forest lies outside of the original Rincon Rainforest plan, and will not be included unless further donations for land purchase are forthcoming. "Choice forest" means both that it is very valuable biologically and the standing timber is valuable. The entire management costs and legal fees have been 7.36% of the total donated for land, and have been met entirely from a combination of environmental services payments (Pagos Servicios Ambientales) from the Government of Costa Rica, and interest income from the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund.
All owners throughout the entire purchase process since 1999 had already moved off their land when sold, and were eager to sell to anyone for any purpose. Essentially, we purchased standing timber, logging rights, and land that would have been converted to plantations of gmelina, palm heart, soft timber, or fruit trees, and low-grade pasture and occasional bean fields. This is the destiny of the remaining areas of forest along the boundaries of the Rincon Rainforest.
You have started the saving of this rain forest forever. Now it is up to ACG.
You have bought existence for it and the 30,000+ species that live in it.
You have helped the ACG's seasonal migrants from the dry forest to the rainforest to survive each yearly cycle.
You have bought homes for the 64 species of northern migrant birds that are known to pass the winter there.
You have extended the elevational coverage of the ACG rain forest from its previous elevational limit of 400 m, down to 200 m at the most northern part of the Rincon Rainforest.
And you have helped the ACG survive global warming by allowing it to expand more to the east, into the Rincon Rainforest.
On behalf of all those species, we thank you all. Dan Janzen, Winnie Hallwachs, Sigifredo Marin, and the entire ACG staff.
WHAT IS NEXT?
The energy behind the Rincon Rainforest is now being turned to two new challenges.
1. ACG is joining together with all of the conservation sentiment, experience and enthusiasm of Costa Rica as a whole, all sectors of society, to seek permanent endowment of the entire 25% of the country that is conserved wild areas - marine as well as terrestrial. There will be more on this very new initiative as it unfolds.
2. The ongoing biodiversity inventory of ACG (http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu), and the detailed forest inspections associated with the Rincon Rainforest land purchases of the past seven years, have discovered an array of small to large forest parcels nestled up against one of the ACG boundaries. All funds donated for land purchase will go to purchasing these, one at a time, by priority indicated through biodiversity importance and owner eagerness to sell. Each parcel by itself is inappropriate for a major campaign such as financed the Rincon Rainforest, and it is our hope that the ACG supporters will continue to take these forests off the marketplace and into permanent survival as part of ACG. We will do all the work for this security - all we need is the purchase funds. There is no overhead charged on any land purchase donation, and often we have been successful in finding 1:1 matching funds from those who believe strongly in conserving wild tropical biodiversity and its ecosystems.
Write a check to the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund - GDFCF
Send it to Professor Daniel H. Janzen, Department of Biology, 415 South University Avenue, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Information for wire transfer or stock gift options is available on request (djanzen@sas.upenn.edu).
The GDFCF is a California registered 501.c.3 non-profit charitable organization (tax ID number 94-3280315). Your donation is fully tax deductible (up to half your annual taxable income). There is no overhead charged on it (all GDFCF administrative actions are pro bono), and 100% of your donation is used to buy rain forest for inclusion in Area de Conservacion Guanacaste. All current operations costs are being met by environmental services payments from the Costa Rican government and interest income from the GDFCF. All later management costs will be met by the Rincon Rainforest endowment fund or ACG budgets.
What is Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG),
the conserved wildland into which the Rincon Rainforest will be merged when bought?
ACG (see http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr) is 113,000 terrestrial hectares and 43,000 marine hectares of permanently conserved government-owned wildlands in northwestern Costa Rica. It began in 1971 as the 10,400 ha Parque Nacional Santa Rosa, a national monument and tropical dry forest national park. This conservation unit began to expand in 1986 to restore and conserve an entire tropical dry forest ecosystem. The expansion is essentially done and the restoration process is in full operation. Today ACG is a single biophysical unit about 90 km long, stretching from 17 km out in the Pacific Ocean, across the Pacific coastal plain, over the top of the Cordillera Guanacaste, and down to 200 m elevation in the east in the foothills of the Caribbean coastal plain (see maps above). It contains about 235,000 species in its dry forest, cloud forest and rain forest, and the intergrades between these major ecosystems. This is roughly 2.4% of the world's terrestrial biodiversity, or 60% of the species that occur in Costa Rica. It is also as many species as occur in the continental USA, packed into an area the size of a US major city with its suburbs. ACG was decreed a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site on 2 December 1999, and the definition is written such that any additions to it are automatically part of the WHS.
The ACG dry forest ecosystem cannot be conserved without also conserving the cloud forest and rain forest along its eastern (upwind) side. These wetter and cooler forests are where many of the dry forest species migrate to pass the 6-month dry season. Equally important, as global warming dries and heats the ACG dry forest today, the eastern wetter and cooler forests are the long-term refuge into which they are retreating.
ACG is a fully functional decentralized governmental unit with a management endowment, 97 professional Costa Rican resident staff members, and programs in education, research, tourism, reforestation, biodiversity development, fire control, police protection, and facilities. All salaries are paid by income generated by the endowment, and operations costs are met by payment for environmental goods and services, plus a small government subsidy. ACG is integrated with the other 11 Costa Rican Conservation Areas, which together constitute SINAC (Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación) within MINAE, the Ministerio del Ambiente y Energía (Ministry of the Environment and Energy), covering about 25% of the country with some kind of wild area protection status.
ACG has three volcanos in its (wet) eastern side - Volcán Orosí (1400 m), Volcán Cacao (1500 m) and the Volcán Rincón de la Vieja complex (2000 m). All together are called the Cordillera Guanacaste. The northern and eastern slopes of these volcanos are clothed in magnificent cloud forest and very wet rain forest - they face directly into the trade winds blowing off the Caribbean. The rain forests on the eastern lower slopes of Volcán Orosí and Volcán Cacao are already conserved in the ACG right out to the boundary with the agricultural landscape, thanks to the generosity of thousands of individual donors in many countries during the past 15 years. The lower elevation pass (Sector San Cristobal) between Volcán Cacao and Volcán Rincón de la Vieja was purchased in 1992-1998, thereby consolidating ACG into one biological and geographical unit (see maps at the beginning of this web page).
However, the orginal boundary for Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieja (today the most eastern part of ACG), was drawn as a straight line at 900-1000 m elevation along the northern and eastern slopes of the volcano (see color maps above). All the terrain above this elevation was included in PNRV, but that below it was left in private hands for frontier colonization. Intensive agriculture in the Caribbean lowlands stopped at 400-700 m elevation. The broad band of luxuriant rain forest between this agriculture and the old ACG boundary at 900-1000m was "colonized" by a sprinkling of subsistence farmers and ranchers between 1960 and 1980. These people cleared some patches of forest for bean fields and pasture, and harvested the best timber from some other patches. Much forest remained uncut as old-growth. And then Volcán Rincón erupted mud and steam, the bottom fell out of the cattle market, government conservation policies made timber cutting more difficult, the second generation of colonists urbanized, and aging owners moved to the greater health haven of a more urban life. This created the 1999-2006 opportunity to incorporate the Rincon Rainforest into ACG by simply buying it from owners eager to sell, and with no problem of having to relocate landowners, since they have already moved off. All of this ACG rainforest expansion was set in motion in 1997 by a large group of landowners who came to the ACG and asked to be bought out, long after the early 1990's when ACG thought its boundaries were relatively fixed.
During the purchase, the Rincon Rainforest, despite containing the beginnings of about 65 farms, ranches and logging operations (see property maps below), was completely unoccupied by its owners. It is now a tangled patchwork of gorgeous old-growth forest and rivers, restoring forest following highgrade timber extraction and one-time bean fields, and small pastures regerating to forest around former homesteads. The "single" half-hearted colonization event of the Rincon Rainforeste area was not enough to extinguish this very species-rich forest, though it certainly altered it. Now to be left in peace, the Rincon Rainforest will continue its rapid natural restoration. In two to three centuries, even the best ecologists will be hard put to determine that it once suffered this anthropogenic battering. But the only way to achieve that restoration was to buy it off the market, and this you have done.
In Holdridge's formal forest classification scheme, the Rincon Rainforest is Premontane Rainforest (Bosque Pluvial Premontano) at 900 meters down to Very Humid Rainforest (Bosque Muy Humedo Tropical) at 200 meters elevation. In generic terms it is classical piedmont rainforest on volcanic foothill soils, receiving 4-5 meters of rain annually. It is home to at least 500 species of vertebrates, 3000 species of plants, and many tens of thousands of species of insects, mites, fungi, bacteria, nematodes, spiders, and protozoans. Many of the species in the portions at lower elevations do not occur elsewhere in ACG. Its old-growth forests are 30-50 meters tall. The lower productivity of its poor soils is partly offset by the cooler climate at these intermediate elevations, a coolness that means less respiration at night so greater net productivity for the plants. It is rain forest that borders what was once the great flatland rain forests of northern Costa Rica (these forests are now almost entirely converted to agroscape). These forests are the last remaining refuges for many species of lowland rainforest animals and plants.
As a 5,600 ha isolated patch of forest, the Rincon Rainforest would quickly deteriorate biologically just as does any other anthropogenic forest island in the agroscape. However, by merging the Rincon Rainforest with ACG along its very long northern/eastern boundary, its organisms can participate in the annual and supra-annual elevational movements up and down these volcanic slopes. It can also retain the overall uphill habitat size that its populations and individuals always have had, even if its eastern lower elevation extension has been truncated. Aside from a possibility of future expansion of a few thousand hectares more to the northeast, ACG and and the Rincon Rainforest will just have to live with the reality of this agroscape as the neighbor.
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Detailed inventory of the Rincon Rainforest's biodiversity is now underway. The first priority was to get it off the timber and plantation market, and that is now done. Rapid survey (as well as its formal categorization into three Holdridge Life Zones) found that its fauna and flora are as species-rich and unique as are those of Estación Biológica Pitilla on the eastern side of Volcan Orosi, in the most northeastern corner of the ACG. To put this in context, Estacion Pitilla has been intensively surveyed and has the greatest insect species diversity of any site in Costa Rica.
The combination of the specific location of the Rincon Rainforest and its specific biological traits give it special biological importance for ACG:
1) The addition of the Rincon Rainforest has more than doubled the contiguous area of this rainforest type in the ACG.
2) The lower elevations of the Rincon Rainforest contain thousands of species of lowland rainforest biodiversity that occur nowhere else in ACG.
3) The Estacion Pitilla area survey has encountered the greatest species richness of any area in ACG (and Costa Rica), and the incorporation of the Rincon Rainforest is therefore doubling the area of habitat for the most species-rich sector of the entire ACG.
4) When an area of habitat is as small as is the wetter eastern/northern end of ACG - about 30,000 ha - every hectare of increase in size is an important antidote to the negative impact of insularity.
5) Thousands of species of ACG dry forest insects and birds migrate to the wet eastern and northern end of ACG to pass the severe annual dry season on the dry forested Pacific side. Adding the Rincon Rainforest has greatly increased the wet area to which these species can migrate, and therefore helps to conserve the ACG dry forest.
6) The Rincon Rainforest increases the overall area of the low-to-intermediate elevation wetter eastern/northern end of ACG by about 30%, a highly significant increase in size of the part of the ACG that acts as a "lifeboat" for the Pacific dry forest ecosystem as global warming comes upon us. Global warming is making ACG dry forest yet drier and hotter, pushing its species to the wetter and cooler east.
7) The Rincon Rainforest, we have just discovered, is an overwintering site for more than 60 species of northern migrant birds. Many of these birds also overwinter in the dry forest and cloud forest portions of ACG. In short, ACG as a whole is a major overwintering habitat for northern migrants, and by adding the Rincon Rainforest to it, we have substantially increased the amount of habitat available to them.
Thank you, 1,136+ donors.
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Parmentiera valerii an endangered species, and relative of catalpa (Bignoniaceae) , with its cauliflorous fruits born directly on the tree trunk. |
Parmentiera valerii (jicaro de danta) fruits fallen below the parent tree, awaiting a dispersal agent. |
Geonoma palm infrutescence with dark blue ripe fruits. |
Geonoma palm in the primary forest understory. |
But the Rincon Rainforest is also of great managerial importance to the ACG administration and conservation process. The current ACG boundary at 900-1000 m elevation is very far from roads and efficient supervision. This boundary is on steep terrain of very difficult access. It is virtually impossible to prevent poaching of animals and trees along this boundary. While this transgression is minimal today, if the Rincon Rainforest had been logged and purchased for plantation crops (most likely, gmelina or palm heart plantations), the workers circulating through this uninhabited area would have been a constant and unavoidable threat. Now that the Rincon Rainforest has been purchased, the ACG boundary is the boundary of the Rincon Rainforest with the lower elevation contemporary agroscape and its many resident landowners. This boundary lies near an all-weather road (from Dos Ríos to Gavilan to Buenos Aires to Colonia Libertad - see especially the most recent map below), that crosses flat and easily traversed terrain. It has been the ACG experience that such a boundary is both easy to supervise and generally honored by its (many) neighbors. All of these neighbors are strongly influenced by the ACG Biological Education Program, which teaches basic biology within ACG forest to all 4th, 5th and 6th grade students in all 43 neighboring schools (including those in the four towns listed above). Additionally, the projects and employment directly in the Rincon Rainforest sector will further integrate it with this neighboring community.
The Rincon Rainforest is being conserved because it can be merged with an established, consolidated and endowed conservation area. It has been added to the ACG with relatively little increase in management costs. Furthermore, part of these management costs are being recovered through savings gained through the overall joining of the margin of the ACG directly with the margin of the agricultural landscape. Finally, as this campaign has now obtained the funds for the land purchase, the Wege Foundation has provided a $500,000 beginning management endowment for the Rincon Rainforest (as well as an equal amount to endow the ACG Biological Education Program). Futher biodvelopment projects in what will become Sector Stroud-Wege will also cover many of the management costs through their direct activities. For example, a UNDP grant to the Biological Education Program of the ACG has both contructed a rainforest teaching laboratory for school children at Estacion Caribe and renovated the research laboratory/living quarters. The on-going NSF-supported caterpillar inventory (http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu) has constructed a bridge over the Rio Negro in the middle of the Rincon Rainforest, and pays the salaries and other costs for two full-time parataxonomists conducting the biodiversity inventory of the Rincon Rainforest.
(compare with two following maps).
In 1997, about 20 owners of the Rincon Rainforest collectively came to ACG and asked if they could be bought out for inclusion in the ACG. Some had already let contracts for logging their remaining old-growth forest, and others were exploring gmelina and palmito contracts. However, they all decided that they could generate more income by selling to the ACG. It was likewise clear that some of them actually preferred to see their properties go into conservation rather than low-grade agriculture.
Janzen and Hallwachs agreed to explore the site. After two days of walking these forests in January 1998, it was obvious that the ACG should expand to include it. The properties are outlined in the map immediately above. Each square on the grid is one square kilometer (100 hectares). However, the ACG had just suffered a 30% reduction in its management endowment to meet the legal costs of the Santa Elena expropriation (completed in April 2000), and there were simply no funds available for further land purchase. The owners agreed that they would stop all activity and give the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund until March 1999 to come up with a purchase plan and a major downpayment. However, the ACG fund-raising process was at that time focused on completing the purchase (that began in 1992) of the lands joining the southern and northern sectors of the ACG (Volcan Rincon de la Vieja to Volcan Cacao). This $2 million land purchase, termed the "Bridge" but really converting the two-part ACG into one unit, was successfully completed with a grant from the W. Alton Jones Foundation in January 1999.
As of March 1999, only $121,153 from 33 private donors had been raised. This was obviously not sufficient to even suggest a down payment for the entire Rincon Rainforest. The ACG therefore met with the owners in late February 1999 and told them that 1) we could not honor our commitment to buy them as a single unit, 2) they were therefore free to seek whatever buyers they could, and 3) we would continue the effort to raise the funds and buy their properties individually as funds accumulated. The Rincon Rainforest project moved from a grace period to a race against the loggers and agroindustrial purchasers.
By early March 2000, 72 donors had contributed $511,000. This was enough to begin down payments. The first 12 properties purchased, containing 1164.4 hectares, are in darker green in the figure below. Each property was negotiated individually on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis by the project director, Sigifredo Marin, the former ACG director. Each property was re-surveyed and mapped, registered in the national land registry, and covered by a formal title and bill of sale. Installments were at 6-month intervals for 2-4 payments, with no interest on the unpaid balance. The Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund is the present but temporary formal land owner, with the land titles as collateral for the unpaid balance. The entire Rincon Rainforest property will be transferred to the ACG (the national government) as a single unit at the time that the entire project is fully purchased, all management processes are firmly embedded in the ACG overall management process, the Rincon Rainforest management endowment is in place, and the necessary rainforest restoration and biodevelopment processes are in full swing. We estimate/hope that this will occur in 2006-2007.
The 5,600 hectares of the Rincon Rainforest have been for sale since January 1999. As of 31 March 2006, your donations have purchased 98.52% -- 5,517 hectares (13,633 acres), all to be added to Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) as the new Sector Stroud-Wege, when the project is completed. These properties constitute the light green area, divided into individual numbered properties, in the center of the map below (the small isolated cluster of properties on the right (66-69) are donated tradelands). 1,136 individual donors and hundreds of school children in Sweden, Mexico, Canada and the US have contributed $4,562,559. Every penny has been spent or committed, and only for land purchase (there are no overhead charges by any part of the process - all of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund is pro bono). We could owe $76,000 on one remaining contested property, and those funds are pledged. We have averaged $827/ha ($/acre) (for 64 properties). Regional land costs are rising rapidly, but the remaining choice forest lies outside of the original Rincon Rainforest plan, and will not be included unless further donations for land purchase are forthcoming. "Choice forest" means both that it is very valuable biologically and the standing timber is valuable. The entire management costs and legal fees have been 7.36% of the total donated for land, and have been met entirely from a combination of environmental services payments (Pagos Servicios Ambientales) from the Government of Costa Rica, and interest income from the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund.
Current map of Rincon Rainforest and available roads (31 March 2006):
The owners were desperate to liquidate their holdings to reinvest elsewhere. The Ministry of the Environment and Energy (MINAE) grants legal logging permits, albeit slowly. This problem still applies to the forest portions outside of Rincon Rainforest, but bordering ACG. The two photographs below were taken on 19 April 2000, at the end of the rainy season, on the right (east) edge of property #35, before we could bid on its forest. Each large tree was worth about $200 to its owner. There are about 5 such trees in each hectare of most of the forest we are purchasing. It is clear that the project basically purchased the standing timber, got the titled land for "free". Such trees average about 200 years old.
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abandoned homesteads |
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an old bean field headed back to rainforest |
gmelina plantation that was pasture - the understory is future rainforest |
palmito |
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All of the Rincon Rainforest owners had title to their properties, and these are now owned by the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund. Owners tended to use the purchase price to buy other properties with better farming potential, pay off loans for agricultural or forest plantation development in other areas, or to buy urban infrastructure, vehicles, and/or investment securities. As mentioned above, the properties will later be formally transferred to the ACG (= the State) when the Rincon Rainforest is fully consolidated. This delay is to give time to fully consolidate blocks of purchases, arrange land trades with neighbors, and be free of the State bureaucracy in management questions during the early years of forest restoration and biodevelopment. For example, the pastures checkerboarded into the Rincon Rainforest may be most quickly eliminated by a) planting gmelina and other living endowment on them, b) using them as biodegredation sites for clean agricultural waste, or c) even sometimes putting cattle back on them. These management practices all run awry of the formal legislation for State-owned property. There will come a time when Costa Rican conservation legislation is sufficiently goal-implemented that such a delay will not be needed, but legislation is still undergoing evolution in that direction.
Donations are made to the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, registered in the State of California (Dr. Daniel Janzen, President; Dr. Winnie Hallwachs Secretary; Dr. George Gorman, financial manager, all pro bono). They are deductible from US taxable income up to half of a person's income (a formal acknowledgment letter is sent by the GDFCF to the donor). The funds are held in a central account (Schwab) earning investment interest until used for the land purchase. At present, however, all donated funds have been spent. Interest income is also used for land purchase and to bulk up the GDFCF itself, a backup emergency second management endowment established for the ACG with the Kyoto Prize money (the Kyoto Prize in Basic Science to Janzen, November 1997). Of the 1,136 individual donations to the GDFCF to date, 16 are composite donations (from many donors) from the Swedish Children's Rainforest, UK Children's Rainforest, US Children's Rainforest, Children's Rainforest Japan, Rainmaker, Tropical Conservancy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Center for Ecosystem Survival. The latter (gershenz@sfsu.edu) is most famous for putting conservation parking meters in US zoos and other biodiversity-based public centers.
Please feel free to ask any questions about any aspect of this project (djanzen@sas.upenn.edu). It is not a scam. You are welcome to come see it and all the books are open. If the Rincon Rainforest had not been taken off the market, it would have been logged and purchased by the agroscape and gone forever. Since it was purchased by you and the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, it will live on forever, every century more appreciated by humanity, and every day a finer piece of tropical forest.
The Guanacaste Dry Forest Fund does not really seek donations. The GDFCF seeks a contract with you to purchase the Existence of this forest unto perpetuity.
Write a check to the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund - GDFCF
Send it to Professor Daniel H. Janzen, Department of Biology, 415 South University Avenue, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Please.
Professor Daniel Janzen - djanzen@sas.upenn.edu
Dr. Winnie Hallwachs - whallwac@sas.upenn.edu
Ms. Espinita Porcupine - the project mascot for her ten brief years of life
Sr. Sigifredo Marin, on-site project director - bioguasi@sol.racsa.co.cr
Sr. Roger Blanco, ACG representative - rblanco@acguanacaste.ac.cr
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Pictures and information on this page were taken from http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu/RR/rincon_rainforest.htm which may now have a more updated version.
