Conservation Everywhere

“To make the most of our protected areas, we must think beyond their boundaries and complement our wildernesses with conservation everywhere else too, from industrial rivers. . . to the roofs of buildings and farmer’s fields” Emma Marris from Rambunctious Garden (2011, 135). 

This quote provides a needed juxtaposition to one of the influential views that we explore in our rainforest immersion field course. MacArthur and Wilson’s (1967) The theory of island biogeography. This book established two fundamental principles. Larger islands support more species than smaller ones and remote islands support fewer species than less remote ones. Moreover, they also established how habitat can be insulated by not only water, but anything dividing a landscape such as mountains and climate, or, in the modern world, human development.

In these two maps, Carara National Park is at the center of a landscape that includes agricultural fields, a highway, pacific coast beaches, small towns, a mangrove reserve, and 24 scarlet macaw nests. Carara encompasses 5,242 hectares of transitional forest at the intersection of the tropical wet ecosystems of Costa Rica’s Southern Pacific and the tropical dry habitat’s in the nation’s Northwest. Carara therefore hosts a great concentration of biodiversity, a microcosm of Costa Rica itself, and includes one of the country’s last habitats for Scarlet Macaws (Ara Macao). The park’s name derives from an indigenous language that would translate as “river of crocodiles” and many guide books describe Carara as a wildlife oasis. In the field of biogeography, Carara is a terrestrial island.

Carara National Park and surrounding area

Carara and all of Costa Rica’s preserved natural areas offer students in my annual Rainforest Immersion program an excellent case study of the history of conservation biogeography and its future beyond the dichotomized debate between preserving a Single Large sections of habitat, or Several Small captured in the SLOSS acronym. Preston (1962a, 1962b) first raised the concern that many nature preserves and parks were just too small to support many species. Later, Diamond (1975) connected these ideas and developed a set of design principles for the management of an ecologically sound park system. These included: (1) larger protected areas will hold more species than smaller ones; (2) a protected area closer to others will support more species than an isolated one; (3) a round park will hold more species than a long narrow area; and (4) corridors between conservation areas might mitigate the island problem. 

When compared to Costa Rica’s other national parks, Carara is one of the smallest, more isolated, narrow in its northern geography, and would require one of the longest corridors in Costa Rica to connect to another large protected area. Therefore, Carara should be a lower priority for Costa Rica’s conservation area system. It certainly seemed so in my eleven years working in and around Carara while traveling to other and more internationally recognized parks like Santa Rosa, Corcovado, La Amistad, and the privately managed Monteverde cloud forest. Yet, Carara’s wild symbol, the Scarlet Macaw, is one of Costa Rica’s conservation success stories. A nesting pair is captured in this picture.

Between 1990 and 1994, Carara’s macaws were on the decline with average counts totaling less than 215 individuals (Vaughn et al. 2005). By 2008, the population had doubled to 432 individuals (Guittar, Dear, Vaughn 2009). And ironically, the conservation effort didn’t focus on the park, but everywhere else. Environmental education focusing on the Scarlet Macaw was implemented in the schools of Carara’s surrounding communities (Vaughn et al. 2003). A nonprofit conservation organization was established to facilitate regional stakeholder meetings, promote economic incentives tied to Macaw conservation, experiment with artificial nests, protect natural nests, and implement an annual volunteer monitoring program (Vaughn 2002). In short, Carara’s Scarlet Macaw conservation would best be described as embracing Single Large AND Several Small, or SLASS. 

Our field course recognizes that the SLOSS dichotomy is a false debate. It’s not single large or several small. Successful conservation requires the pursuit of both (Bennett 2004). Or, like this blog entry’s title, conservation everywhere! Even more radically, as Marris (2011) would articulate, our conservation views needs a new lens.

Some optical illusions, like the illustration that can be a rabbit or a duck depending on how you look at it, rely on a gestalt switch. You see an image one way, unable to see the other possibility, and then suddenly your brain flips and sees it the other way. A protected-areas-only, pristine-wilderness-only view of conservation sees a globe with a few shrinking islands of nature on it. Nature is in the foreground, human-dominated lands the background. The new view, after the gestalt switch, sees impervious surfaces—pavement, houses, malls where nothing can grow—as the foreground and everything else as the background nature. . . from vast fields of genetically identical corn to city parks to the last hectares of South America’s Atlantic Forest. (135).

Trust me, Costa Rica’s background nature is exploding with life. Or, you could come see for yourself!

For more on this topic, see:

Bennett, Graham. 2004. Integrating biodiversity conservation and sustainable use: lessons learned. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, World Conservation Union.

Diamond, Jared M. 1975. “The island dilemma: lessons of modern biogeographic studies for the design of natural reserves.” Biological Conservation 7(2): 129-146.

Guitarr, John L., Fiona Dear, and Christopher Vaughn. 2009. “Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao, Psittaciformes: Psittacidae) nest characteristics in the Osa Peninsula Conservation Area (ACOSA), Costa Rica. Revista de Biologíca Tropical 57(1-2): 387-93.

MacArther, Robert H. and Edward O. Wilson. 1967. The theory of island biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marris, Emma. 2011. Rambunctious garden: saving nature in a post-wild world. New York: Bloomsbury.

Preston, F.W. 1962. “The canonical distribution of commonness and rarity: Part 1.” Ecology 43: 185-215.

Preston, F.W. 1962. “The canonical distribution of commonness and rarity: Part 2.” Ecology 43: 410-432.

Vaughan, Christopher. 2002. Conservation strategies for a Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) population in Costa Rica. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin.

Vaughan, Christopher, Julie Gack, Humberto Solorazano, and Roberto Ray.  2003.  "The Effect of Environmental Education on Schoolchildren, Their Parents, and Community Members: A Study of Intergenerational and Intercommunity Learning." The Journal of Environmental Education 34(3):12-21.

Vaughn, Christopher, Nicole M. Nemeth, John Cary, and Stanley Temple. 2005.  Response of a Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) population to conservation practices in Costa Rica.  Bird Conservation International 15: 119-130.