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Credit: Image courtesy of Cornell University
In 1993, Carl Leopold, the William H. Crocker Scientist Emeritus at BTI partnered up with some of his colleagues at the Ithaca’s Tropical Forestry Initiative to start this Costa Rican rain forest restoration research project. The group gathered local rain forest trees and began planting groups of them in overused cattle pastures in Costa Rica. The cattle pastures had been in use for 50 years and were densely packed by countless heads of cattle stomping around looking for food. The soil was stripped of nutrients and natural cover.
"For 50 years the soil had been compacted under countless hooves, and its nutrients washed away. When it rained, Leopold said, the red soil appeared to bleed from the hillsides."
The researchers had a pretty tough time finding trees to plant for the project because you can’t just go out and buy seeds to replant a rain forest. Leopold and his wife put in a lot of hours riding out on horse back to meet with locals that would report seed sightings on trees around the neighboring farms. The group would chose to collect and plant sun loving fast growing trees. The researchers kept close watch over the trees until they took hold in the soil and continually trimmed back the grasses that were planted for the cattle.
The time and effort by everyone involved is paying off though. It only took 5 years for the groupings of sun loving trees to rise up and form a canopy shading out the pasture grass that the cows used to graze on. Then after only 10 years the researchers returned and were greeted with great progress. In each of the pastures where the trees were planted the group counted over 100 native plants that had returned to around the trees.
Although there has been significant developments regarding restoration of the rain forest, the researchers say it still may take hundreds of years to completely re-grow a whole rain forest. These last 15 years have truly shown that with a little effort, planning and conversation we can undo some of the worst things we’ve done to native rain forest land. I would love to see groups and corporations adopting larger scale rejuvenation projects like this one all around the world. Rain forests are absolutely amazing to me and are unbelievably essential to our ecosystem that I believe many more of these projects should exist.
Source: ScienceDaily.com
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Jason
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Its good to know that it is still possible to reclaim the rain forests of south America. I would love to see the U.S. Sponsor funding for a restoration project.
Big Ben Pattons last blog post..Looking Back And Looking Forward
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Big Ben Patton: I would love to see something like that too or maybe even a Kiva type program for rain forests.
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May 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
What a wonderful article for a Friday. More rain forest restoration projects are definitely needed. Perhaps getting kids involved with these restoration projects would be great as well.
Composting Richards last blog post..1
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Composting Richard: Getting kids involved is a wonderful idea Richard and I think it’s one of the only ideas that can keep change going. Thanks for coming by I hope all is well at GreenCulture.
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