Life Zones

Ecologists define 12 tropical life zones in Costa Rica, which are named according to forest type and altitude in a system devised by and named after LR Holdridge !hus there are dry, moist, and rain forests in tropical, premontane, lower montane, montane, and subalpine areas !hus Costa Rica has a huge variety of habitats, each with particular associations of plants and animals !he country"s e#tensive and ambitious national par$ system is an attempt to protect them all

Major Environmental Problems

%espite Costa Rica"s national par$ system, the mayor problem facing the nation"s environment is deforestation Costa Rica"s natural vegetation was originally almost all forest, but most of this has been cleared, mainly for pasture of agriculture !he &' (ood and )griculture *rganization estimates, that between 1+,- and 1+.+, Costa Rica"s forests were being lost at an average rate of 2 -/ each year !he situation has improved over the past decade, however0 !ree plantations are being developed, and the availability of commercially grown timber means there is less pressure to log the natural forests !he first and greatest issue is soil erosion (orests protect the soil beneath them from the ravages of tropical rainstorms, and after deforestation much of the topsoil is washed away, lowering the productivity of the land and silting up watersheds 1ome deforested lands are planted with Costa Rica"s main agricultural product, bananas, the production of which entails the use of pesticides and blue plastic bags to protect the fruit 2oth the pesticides and the plastic bags end up polluting the environment %eforestation is happening at such a rate that most of Costa Rica"s 3and the world"s4 tropical forest will have disappeared by the first decades of the 21st century5 loss of other habitats is a less publicized but e6ually pressing concern Rainforests are important on a global scale because they moderate global climatic patterns 1cientist have determined that the destruction of the rainforests is a mayor contributing factor to global warming, affecting the crop production and sea7levels, leaving many coasts and cities underwater 8lants and animal species, medicines, plant9s resistance to epidemics and protection of local indigenous people are factors that are affected by the deforestation Efforts are now underway to show that the economic value of the standing rainforest is greater than the wealth realized be deforestation