Sixty-Seven Years of Land-Use Change in Southern Costa Rica

Abstract

Habitat loss and fragmentation of forests are among the biggest threats to biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in tropical landscapes. We use the vicinity of the Las Cruces Biological Station in southern Costa Rica as a regional case study to document seven decades of land-use change in one of the most intensively studied sites in the Neotropics. Though the premontane wet forest was largely intact in 1947, a wave of immigration in 1952 initiated rapid changes over a short period. Overall forest cover was reduced during each time interval analyzed (1947-1960, 1960-1980, 1980-1997, 1997-2014), although the vast majority of forest loss (> 90%) occurred during the first two time intervals (1947-1960, 1960-1980) with an annual deforestation rate of 2.14% and 3.86%, respectively. The rate dropped to < 2% thereafter and has been offset by forest recovery in fallow areas more recently, but overall forest cover has continued to decline. Approximately 27.9% of the study area is forested currently. Concomitantly, the region shifted from a single contiguous forest to a series of progressively smaller forest fragments with each successive survey. A strong reduction in the amount of core habitat was paralleled by an increased proportion of edge habitat, due to the irregular shape of many forest fragments. Structural connectivity, however, remains high, with an expansive network of > 100 km of linear strips of vegetation within a 3 km radius of the station, which may facilitate landscape-level movement for some species. Despite the extent of forest loss, a substantial number of regional landscape-level studies over the past two decades have demonstrated the persistence of many groups of organisms such as birds and mammals. Nonetheless, the continued decline in the quantity and quality of remaining habitat (similar to 30% of remaining forest is secondary), as well as the threat of an extinction debt (or time lag in species loss), may result in the extirpation of additional species if more proactive conservation measures are not taken to reverse current trends-a pattern that reflects many other tropical regions the world over.