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| Program: | Involving local communities in conservation and scientific research at the Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica |
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Program Status
Ongoing (since 2008).Program Partners and Personnel
Our partner in Costa Rica is the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF).Key people for this project are: Drs. Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs of the University of Pennsylvania, Sigifredo Marin (on-site coordinator and director for GDFCF projects at ACG), and Maria Chavarria for the education in marine biology and conservation.
Purpose
Our work in 2008 was aimed at providing necessary additional protection of certain sectors within the biologically important Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica.One of our two projects in 2009 was aimed at enhancing the protection of ACG, while building capacity to collect information of scientific and conservation value. This involves: (1) training five park guards as parataxonomists; and (2) integrating them into the ongoing biodiversity inventory work and establish their duties in their new role as a combined guard and parataxonomist.
The second project in 2009, a low-budget one, involved training youth from a local fishing community through after-school marine biology classes and field trips and field courses with instruction in biology and ecology.
Actions and Results
Adding protection of new sectors of ACG and training of parataxonomistsWork in 2008 involved:
- protecting new sectors of the ACG using sector guards and caretakers for one year while longer-term provisions for this were being developed;
- providing materials for needed new biological field stations and for repair of existing field stations.
Parataxonomists at work.
- Five positions for parataxonmist trainees were filled by April (after a few false starts) and they trained under their respective mentors at five field stations (Estacion Quica, Sector Pitilla; and Estacion Leiva, Estacion Botarrama, Estacion Llanura, and Estacion Caribe, all in the Rincon Rainforest Sector). All personnel are working out well to date.
- At each station, their work schedules were developed for their new role as a combined guard and parataxonomist. Their duties include collecting biological specimens, rearing caterpillars, entering records in a computer database, patrolling their sectors and interacting with neighbours living/working in the vicinity.
- At 1-2 week intervals parataxonomists from all five stations convene to jointly exchange ideas and discuss problems and solutions.
Work in 2010 is similar to that in 2009, with further training for new parataxonomists and some additional duties relating to special projects and circumstances.
Biological and conservation education in the ACG area
Throughout 2009, Maria Chavarria conducted weekend camping field trips with 12 students in the ACG coast near Cuajiniquil, both by land and by sea. Prospective students applied in writing and 12 were selected as participants. The course plan emphasizes: self-reliance (they do all their own cooking and other caretaking); written and oral communication about scientific observations and information; and understanding of basic ecological processes (competition, carrying capacity, mutualism, predator-prey relationships, taxonomy, natural history life cycles, etc.).
In 2010, we are doing a repeat of work done in 2009.
Background
The Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) is: 163,000 hectares of stunning tropical forest and marine habitat in northwestern Costa Rica, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2% of the country, and 2.6% of the world's biodiversity. It is the product of one of the world's most successful habitat restoration and conservation efforts. The ACG is home to an estimated 230,000 species of plants and animals, and it supports research at the leading edge of ecology, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, biodevelopment, child education, and conservation.Most of the land portion of ACG is dry lowland forest, which is an especially endangered habitat type in the tropics. ACG also protects adjacent areas of rain forest and cloud forest that are ecologically interlinked with and vital to the dry forest as well as being important in their own right. And it now includes a 70,000-ha marine component.
ACG and the associated Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund also demonstrate the benefits of employing people from local communities while building support for and understanding of conservation within those communities.
Parataxonomist training
Dan Janzen at work.
Experience at the Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) over the past 23 years of carrying out a biodiversity inventory of ACG has shown that parataxonomists are a very effective way of creating intellectually elevated employment for local rural people of humble working-class origins, effectively moving them into middle-class positions in a rural environment. Simultaneously it creates the human resources for management of large complex conserved wildlands, whether the parataxonomists are engaged solely in collecting for biodiversity inventory or whether their duties include other work such as education, policing, emergency care, tourism, role modeling for children and adults, data provision to upper level administrators and strategic planning. Further, it does this with people already in the depressed working class agroecosystem, thereby providing a job-conversion escape from jobs dependent on a rural ecosystem that is degrading and shrinking throughout the tropics. And it builds and support for and understanding of biodiversity conservation among local people and more broadly within the country.
ACG currently has 28 experienced parataxonomists working out of 9 biological stations (Santa Rosa, Gongora, Cacao, Los Almendros, Pitilla, San Gerardo, Caribe, Brasilia, La Perla) spread over about 130,000 terrestrial hectares. About 80% were trained through apprenticeship to experienced parataxonomists and the others by formal courses in 1989, 1990 and 1992, taught by Drs. D. H. Janzen and W. Hallwachs. They are funded by a combination of NSF grants and private donations and subsidized by the ACG infrastructure and administrative structure. They are viewed informally by ACG as simply part of the staff (formal ACG staff is 85 persons). Their current primary project is inventory of the Lepidoptera and their parasitoids of ACG, the plants of ACG, and the DNA barcoding of all of those specimens.
ACG is divided into 18 sectors of approximately 2,000-10,000 ha each, each with an Encargado de Sector, who serves as a general "do everything" for his/her Sector (and then calls on more specialized people to conduct a specific action such as chase a hunter or put out a fire).
Our work involves training five Encargado de Sector as parataxonomists for each of the three new eastern rainforest Sectors that are spread over approximately 10,000 ha of highly fractured terrain.
The apprenticeship process follows a well established protocol. Since all of the experienced parataxonomists have become that through apprenticeship (and/or courses), and since the job is very hands-on with organisms that they know yet do not know, this system works extremely well. By becoming a parataxonomist, the Encargado de Sector job of "patrolling" is transformed to one of collecting trips intermingled with reacting to emergency situations.
Biological and conservation education in the ACG area
The project is part of a larger effort aimed at transforming the 500-family coastal town of Cuajiniquil from an impoverished artesanal free-forage fishing town that was destroying both itself and the marine ecosystem of the Area de Conservación Guanacaste into a smaller, self-sustaining village whose economy is based on a diversity of activities that are integrated with ACG to its south and the tourism-potential coast to the north.
This objective stands in contrast to the classical method of "declare the marine area a national park and engage in decades of cops-and-robbers interactions with the dying and resentful town on its margin" (quote from Dan Janzen). The method we're employng costs less money, requires a very different interaction with Cuajiniquil, and has a much better outcome.
The program takes advantage of the availability of an exceptional person, biologist Maria Marta Chavarria, to carry out conservation-related education at the community level. Her work has brought the community significant understanding of the resource that is dwindling in front of them. The children whom she has taught in turn teach their parents, with the result that adults have become interested in taking courses themselves.
Marine biology/conservation school group.
Chavarria's work focuses primarily on grade school-age children in Cuajiniquil. All of these children — approximately 200 at any one time. — are programmed and educated by the ACG Programa de Educacion Biologica (PEB). PEB conducts six visits to ACG per year by each 4th, 5th, and 6th grade student, on the ACG budget (approximately 20% of ACG annual expenses). Chavarria selects self-emerging subsets of these students and spends intense two-day field weekends with them in ACG doing field ecological projects and living in and on the edge of the forest and in the marine area (and on ACG islands). She does the same thing with parents from Cuajiniquil and with the entire teacher cohort serviced by PEB over 50+ schools ringing ACG.
In 1986 the nascent ACG realized that by far the most effective long-term conservation solution for the emerging ACG, aside from buying land and stopping hunting/burning/logging, was to simply teach basic biology and ecology in the field, in ACG, to all 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students in all schools ringing ACG — as far out as budget would allow. Today, this involves about 2,500 students per year in 50+ schools, and about 20% of the ACG budget. There are 11 full-time teachers, two school buses and an extremely complex (and computerized) scheduling system developed over the years to be sure that (1) no one is left out, (2) no student does the same field trip twice, and (3) the students regularly do field projects in ecosystems different from the one in which they live (coastal students go to the rain forest, rain forest students go to dry forest, etc.).
While the PEB program has worked extremely well for this rural, the small fishing town of Cuajiniquil is a special case, requiring substantially more attention per student and per family than the remaining (dying, shrinking) villages ringing ACG. This is because Cuajiniquil is/was based on the hunter-gatherer practice of artesanal fishing selling to the market of San Jose, and because a major hunting ground for them is/was the marine area decreed a national park (no take area) in 1970 and 1977, and then a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. This requires a staged cessation of fishing activity coupled with support for alternate means of income generation. The process was also being forced on the village by their own steady depletion of the resource both inside the national park and for a very large marine area outside of it. Hence the need for the current small project.
As a small yet telling example, the star young teenage student in Chavarria's current field trip/course is the daughter of the primary commercial (illegal) deer hunter (and fisherman) in Cuajiniquil.
Education coupled with attempts at police-style patrolling by ACG marine staff is resulting in a steady decline in human impact on ACG's marine ecosystem, and it is hoped that within five years the impact will be approximately the same as it is on the terrestrial parts of ACG — the occasional case of poaching or other transgression, but by-and-large a wildland that is being allowed to restore itself. It seems clear that this kind of personal interaction is required if there is to be a healthy relationship between Cuajiniquil and ACG as the local communities gradually comes to understand the Sector Marina as a marine no-take zone that can be developed for controlled ecotourism, research, and other non-damaging uses. ACG's 43,000-ha Sector Marina is not large enough to enable a major fishing industry on its margins through leakage out into fishing zones, but as Cuajiniquil gradually moves into other sources of income (practically the entire town and adjacent neighborhood has been purchased by European speculators anticipating its tourist development), at least ACG will be less "blamed" for as a source of economic difficulty.
International Conservation Fund of Canada