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Effective Management of Protected Areas

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We recently hosted a mobile workshop organized by CATIE (the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) and Conservation International to train people in the planning and management of protected areas.

The group spent two weeks visiting protected areas in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and learning how to best tackle the challenges of planning and managing protected areas in a changing world.


Paso Pacifico Country Director Liza Gonzalez showed our visitors how we apply the principles of ecology to manage protected areas from ridge to reef in the Paso del Istmo biological corridor.

Foresters at the Isla Vista Reserve showcased our reforestation efforts, turtle rangers at the La Flor protected area explained how they monitor and protect turtle nests, and kayak guides in Ostional showed them the mangroves.

We also shared our experience in using conservation finance to pay for personnel to help protect endangered species, like sea turtles and spider monkeys.

Among the highlights? Spider monkeys at the Isla Vista Reserve appear to be getting used to our researchers, as they didn’t disappear the moment the group came into view.

Thanks to project coordinators, Jim Barborak and Miguel Morales from Conservation International, and Elena Florian from CATIE for a great visit!

For more information about the seminar, you can download this PDF.

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La Prensa reports on our reforestation program in Paso del Istmo (in Spanish).

Paso Pacifico’s national director is quoted:

Esto se ha hecho en sólo tres años, son 450 hectáreas las que ya están reforestadas y la meta es reforestar cinco mil hectáreas en toda la zona y lo más importante es que se están plantando árboles que son nativos de estas tierras.

In just three years, Liza explains, we’ve reforested 450 acres, and our goal is to reforest 5000 hectares total. She points out the significance of the fact that native trees are being planted. Native trees means habitat restoration for yellow-naped parrots and spider monkeys.

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Over at SeedMagazine.com, there’s a great discussion of the need to align economic incentives and biological imperatives.

Problems could be averted if species had a value that was neither zero nor infinity, and if there were incentives for people to engage in environmental stewardship before a species becomes endangered.
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We can also use market mechanisms to transfer the actual value of environmental assets to stakeholders in a local community. In low-income countries, efforts to protect the environment often ignore the needs of local people, and efforts to alleviate poverty can produce incentives to degrade the environment. Pristine land is often a low-income community’s most valuable asset, yet they tend to lack access to the conservation value of those resources. Responsibly capitalizing those resources while explicitly linking the capitalization to environmental stewardship could embed a sustained conservation incentive within communities. Some groups have focused on spending —  so-called biodiversity payments — to protect the environment in such situations. We believe that a focus on lending is the best approach.

One of the authors, Josh Donlan, was a Kinship Conservation Fellow with our national director, Liza Gonzalez. For more on his innovative conservation policies, check out this profile of him at ExperienceLife.com. Josh is helping us with our turtle program, and we’re glad his work is getting some recognition.

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La Prensa has published a piece on our sea kayak training program (in Spanish), designed to promote eco-tourism in San Juan del Sur and Ostional.

The goal of this program is to train young people to become eco-tourism guides, taking advantage of their region’s natural beauty (and the kayaks we’ve furnished with the help of USAID) to launch their own micro-businesses and educate people about the mangroves and coastal ecosystems which are home to birds and other wildlife.

Fabio Collado Vargas, a former fisherman who has joined our program, was quoted:

Pues esto lo estamos haciendo en momentos que la situación económica de El Ostional es muy difícil, y al menos tenemos la esperanza de ganar algo de dinero, y que con esta oferta vengan más turistas a El Ostional.

The economic climate in Ostional is hard, he explains, and this sea kayaking opportunity means a chance to to earn some money and bring more tourists to Ostional.

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We’re pleased to see that a small tourism business is offering a special package for our harbor clean up!

For $20, guests will be provided transportation between Managua and San Juan del Sur, where they’ll be served lunch and be able to participate in the clean up activities.

This is just the indicator of success we love to see! A for-profit business is recognizing the value of our conservation work, and contributing to public awareness of Nicaragua’s natural beauty and its need for protection.

Thank you El Timon and NTUR!

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Julie Martinez, our environmental education instructor, has been working with elementary school kids in the Rivas province of Nicaragua. The kids are learning about the ecology of tropical dry forests, and starting to address environmental problems in their own community.

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We’ve officially launched our sea turtle program in the Rivas province, and La Prensa picked it up to share the story with the rest of Nicaragua.

The campaign, designed to protect critically endangered sea turtles who nest on the beaches of Nicaragua, include environmental education, water conservation, eco-tourism, and local development. It also includes a sea turtle incentive payment program described by country director Liza González:

Es un programa de incentivos. Si hay un comunitario que normalmente se llevaba los huevos de ese nido, entonces el programa va a apoyarlo, si él quiere proteger ese nido va a recibir un incentivo por protección, ese incentivo es equivalente a lo que él ganaría si vendiera los huevos.

The sea turtle payment program offers financial incentives for communities, where turtle eggs were often harvested (or poached) before they hatched, to protect the turtle nests. We pay individuals and make community grants for every protected nest and every turtle hatchling who makes it to the sea.

To support this program, buy one of our sea turtle shower timers, designed to remind you of a very good reason to conserve water.

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Please watch our video addressing the issue of poaching parrots in Nicaragua.

Once abundant in tropical forests, the Yellow-naped parrot (Lora Nuca Amarillo in Spanish) is increasingly rare in Nicaragua, where habitat destruction and poaching have reduced its numbers rapidly.

Poachers are often young rural farmers who climb over 15 meters into trees or chop down trees to take parrot chicks out of their nests. Yellow-naped parrots only have one clutch per year (usually just one to three eggs), and are monogamous, so if they lose their mate, they are out of luck for the rest of their lives.

In addition to environmental education which helps children understand the importance of the species they share the forest with, we’re currently caring for orphan parrot fledglings. These parrots were confiscated by the army near the border of Costa Rica, where the poachers were presumably taking them to sell. We are advising the army on the care of the parrot chicks until the Ministry of Environment authorities decide what to do about them.

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January’s Science roundup included interesting work on coral reefs:

Compiling geological and biological data from fossils, a team of evolutionary scientists has found indications of the following:

  • reefs are important evolutionary cradles independent of their preferred habitat in shallow, tropical environments
  • in nonreefal ecosystems, shallow-water environments represent the most important evolutionary cradles

Understanding reefs will help us understand populations of sea turtles and other marine wildlife as reefs face the threats of pollution and climate change.

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