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

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

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 ...

Modeling the spatial pattern of land-use change with GEOMOD2: application and validation for Costa Rica

The objective of this paper is to simulate the location of land-use change, specifically forest disturbance, in Costa Rica over several decades. This paper presents a GIS-based model, GEOMOD2, which quantifies factors associated with land-use, and simulates the spatial pattern of land-use forward and backward in time. GEOMOD2 reads rasterized maps of land-use and other biogeophysical attributes...

Marijuana and vision--after ten years' use in Costa Rica.

Several tests of visual function were applied to an abstaining user (10 years or more) group and a nonuser group carefully preselected to be free of clinical signs of eye disease. The groups were matched on several criteria. The results show that all findings from both groups are within established limits of normalcy. Small differences and trends were found between the groups. These would have ...

Effect of Land Use Change on Carbon Content and CO2 Flux of Cloud Forest Soils, Santa Elena, Costa Rica

We investigated the effects of land-use changes on soil carbon storage and soil CO2 flux by comparing soils from mature cloud forest and 31-year-old secondary forest, both in the Santa Elena Forest Reserve, a municipallyowned reserve at an elevation of 1600 to 1700 m near the town of Monteverde, and a clear-cut pasture near the reserve. Soils in the mature forest exhibit only weak horizonation ...

Real Progress: Fifty Years Of USAID in Costa Rica