The Guanacaste idea - Guanacaste, Costa Rica

The stakes are high and time is short as scientists try to create a living, working, profitable ecosystem in what is being called the largest restoration project ever attempteed in the tropics.

ON A TORRID PLATEAU between a string of volcanoes and the Pacific Ocean, Julio Diaz kneels, brushes aside some leaves and grass, and spills water from a canteen. Instantly, dozens of minute brown seeds begin writhing, propelled by a corkscrewing motion of their beards. As Diaz stands, he explains that these seeds of "jaragua" grass are pushing themselves into the ground for protection against the parching tropical sun.

Jaragua is a popular pasture grass that has adapted perfectly to the seasonally dry climate here in Guanacaste Province. With a great deal of help from range fires, jaragua is crowding out the few remaining scraps of dry tropical forest in northwestern Costa Rica.

And that makes this aggressive grass public enemy No. 1, as far as Diaz, the fire-crew chief at the Guanacaste Conservation Area, is concerned.

Five centuries ago, a magnificent dense forest covered more than 200,000 square miles of Pacific coastal lowlands from Panama to Central Mexico. Today, after centuries of timber cutting, farming, and ranching, only about one one-thousandth of that area is still recognizable, and only a few hundred square miles are in preserves.

Not so well known as the rainforest, dry tropical forest is equally valuable--and far more endangered, according to Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and an expert on tropical ecosystems. "The Mesoamerican tropical dry forest now exists in very tiny, scattered remnants of enormously altered forest," says Raven. "The dry forest is every bit as rich in local species, in endemic organisms, as tropical rainforests. In South America, dry forests are actually richer in reptiles than rainforests. They are very, very important."

Twenty years ago, as the world began focusing on the accelerating destruction of tropical rainforests, a group of Costa Rican scientists and conservationists were worrying about the surviving scraps of dry forest in Santa Rosa National Park (which later would form the nucleus of Guanacaste Conservation Area). The biggest problem was fires started by arson, accident, and ranchers who wanted to eradicate tree seedlings from pastures. Some of the fires blew a dozen miles, from the feet of the volcanoes all the way to the beach. In their wake, jaragua expanded its grip on the land.

Instead of giving up and moving on, these scientists decided to test a radical solution--a hybrid of biological and social techniques aimed at creating a living, working, profitable ecosystem.

The first step was to convince Costa Pica to set aside 423 square miles of land, stretching from the ocean to beyond the Continental Divide, as a reserve so large and varied that native species could migrate, survive, and evolve. Says Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson, an authority on the relationship between size and species richness of nature preserves, "The concept [at Guanacaste] is very sound--to broaden the area as much as you can, and to go up and down in altitude as much as possible. This maximizes the number of habitats and the amount of biodiversity." In Guanacaste, for example, animals tend to migrate during the dry season away from the parched coast, to the more humid forests in mountains to the east, and a reserve designed to house these species must protect all their seasonal habitats.

Indeed, Guanacaste is a living encyclopedia of tropical habitat: dry forest, cloud forest, rainforest, reefs, rivers, and beaches. It has an estimated 325,000 plants and animals (an astonishing 3 to 6 percent of the world's total biodiversity). It has at least 700 tree species and one-third as many higher (vascular) plants as the United States and Canada, which are 17,000 times as large.

The planners did not want Guanacaste to be a national park in the traditional sense; instead, they were determined to integrate the reserve into the national social and economic fabric and make it a "working asset" for Costa Rican society. Yes, the conservation area would be a tourist destination, but it would also be a major employer and educator of local people, and the site of an intensive search for new seeds, drugs, and industrial chemicals. Yes, previous national parks in Costa Rica had hired a few ill-trained rangers, but the non-profit organization that operates Guanacaste Conservation Area on behalf of the Costa Rican government would stress the hiring and promotion of local people for managerial and scientific jobs.

And since the dry forest was on the verge of extinction itself, Guanacaste would become the largest ecological restoration initiative in the tropical world. In simple terms, here is how it would work:

On 200 square miles of grassland that had once been dry forest, Diaz and his crew would fight fires. Then winds and animals would import the seeds of native trees, vines, and shrubs. But the fire crews had to hurry. Otherwise, the seed-bearing plants would be burned to ashy stumps. Finally, after a century or so, the dry forest would return, with its armadillos and mountain lions, three species of monkeys, more than 300 species of trees, and dozens of thousands of invertebrates.