- Good afternoon, everyone.
You will recall last week when Dr. Zahawi
made his presentation from the Galapagos Islands
that we had internet connectivity issues,
and he has very graciously found time in his busy schedule
to record his research presentation
again from the Galapagos.
So Dr. Zahawi, welcome again,
and we look forward to hearing about your talk
and work in Costa Rica in your talk entitled,
The role of restoration in preserving plant diversity.
- Thank you, Ryan,
and thank you all for being here today,
or listening to this recording.
This talk is focused on a long-term research project
in Southern Costa Rica
with a number of collaborators who are listed here.
My main collaborator, Karen Holl,
and then a number of other colleagues as well
who've worked on and off with this project over the years.
So, restoration has really hit the global scale.
There are numerous initiatives
that have sprung up over the last decade
from all over the world.
These are really impressive commitments,
as you see here with some of these examples on the slide.
But what this generates are really fundamental questions.
One is, how do we restore at these kinds of scales?
Most research and restoration to date
has been on small-scale projects
on the order of a few hectares
or maybe a few dozen hectares,
now we're talking about tens
and hundreds of thousands of hectares and even more.
So how do we move things up to that scale
is a really critical question,
and how do we make it feasible?
So when you're doing small-scale restoration,
adding a few dollars here or there
doesn't really matter that much,
but if you're scaling things up to millions of hectares,
a few dollars multiplied out becomes quite cost prohibitive.
So in the gamut of restoration,
we have natural regeneration
at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
It's much more cost effective to allow a system
basically to regenerate on its own if it can do so.
As in the example here in Yucatan where you have
quite a bit of recovery seen in this photograph
just a couple of years after the plot was let go.
But natural regeneration doesn't always happen.
And this is another other example in Panama
that's a 10-year-old pasture that has been abandoned,
but he wouldn't know it,
because it looks much like it did
probably when it was first let go.
So figuring out how and when to intervene
and the degree of intervention
is really a key piece in this.
Tree planting obviously is one option for restoration,
can facilitate the recovery process
by eliminating aggressive pasture grasses
which are generally intolerant to shade.
It also improves the microclimatic conditions
by providing a little bit of shade,
improving soil conditions through litterfall,
and also, of course, attracting seed dispersers
that bring in seeds from other sources, presumably.
The key crux to this is planting trees
is much more costly than just letting a system go.
It also requires a number of considerations.
So you need to know, first, when planting is needed,
which I already mentioned earlier, but also how to plant.
So first we have to figure out
if we really need to plant trees,
then we need to know the process involved
and also ensure that there's funding in place
for long-term maintenance and monitoring.
So you can't just stick
a 30-centimeter tall seedling in the ground
and call it a day.
In the tropics it will completely be swamped
by grasses and other species
and will be gone within six months.
So you have to put in place long-term funding
to cover that initial phase of restoration
until trees can stand for themselves, fend for themselves.
The end goal is also a really important question.
So in restoration, your end goal might be carbon offsets.
You might just be trying to sequester carbon,
in which case one set of target species might be considered.
Or it might be biodiversity
and in which case you might approach things differently
or plant a different set of species.
So understanding that from the outset is very important.
I work in Southern Costa Rica.
This is a wet part of the country,
about three and a half to four meters
of rainfall per year.
It's a mid elevation, 1200 meters,
and I've been working this part of Costa Rica
for the better part of 20 years.
This area, if you zoom into this spot right up here
and look at it over time,
was a very forested part of the country
in the mid 20th century, but was quickly converted
to an agricultural system by the early 1980s
with about 30% or so forest cover remaining.
This is not unlike many other parts of the tropics.
And if you zoom in further still and look at this over time,
what you're looking at here in the dark green
are old growth, remnant forest that was never cleared,
and in various different shades of orange,
secondary forest that's coming back.
So basically this plot here, this image,
shows you or indicates that this system
has the capacity to recover naturally to some extent.
And then the gray area is all agricultural land today.
Within this system, the area outlined in black
is the Las Cruces Biological Station Reserve.
This is where I worked
for the better part of 10 years as director.
While I was there we established a permanent plot
to study old growth forest over time.
And this is what that plot looks like,
it's 150 by 150 meters where we surveyed and mapped
all trees and lianas greater than five centimeters DBH.
This amounted to about 3,500 individuals
representing 200 or so species.
And we censused this area three times thus far
over the time span of about a little over a decade.
And the results are,
there are many results to this in several publications,
but I'll focus on just one of our early publications here
to underscore an important message.
So this is a rank-abundance curve,
or dominance-diversity curve if you will,
where species are ranked from the most dominant
to the least dominant on your X axis here.
So number one is, appropriately, your top species,
and then all the way out here
180 is your least dominant or your rare species.
And then you've got a log scale on your Y axis,
so basically the translation is your top species here
represents about 10% of all individuals in this forest.
What's really stunning here
is to look at the other end of the scale
and look at these dots over here.
And these species, which amount to over 50 species,
are represented by one individual
in two and a quarter hectares.
Not only that, but between these two surveys,
there was a 50% turnover rate in rare species.
So a couple of those dropped out, a few came in,
and so really quite a dramatic shift,
basically saying two things.
You've got a lot of rare species in there,
so you still have a lot of that diversity in this system,
and there's, looking at this whole plot in general,
there's still a lot of resilience
or ability within the system to bounce back,
because we've got a lot of that species pool still present.
So, we need to focus on facilitating recovery,
but how do we go about doing that?
What we've done in Southern Costa Rica
is establish a long-term restoration project
called the Islas Project.
This was established around 2004 through 2006,
where we had 13 one hectare sites.
And at each of these three sites,
we basically replicated three treatments,
each 1/4 hectare in size.
Here you're looking at these three treatments,
they're each 50 by 50 meters.
Natural regeneration where we didn't plant anything,
a plantation style restoration effort
where we planted the entire area with trees,
and then what we call an island system
or an applied nucleation system
where we planted trees in patches of three different sizes.
We also had adjacent reference forest plots for comparison.
So this is your forest that wasn't cleared
or was selectively logged at some point,
but is the representation of the habitat
I talked about in the previous slide.
Why patches?
Well this is an image of a tree patch that was planted,
this is actually a different study,
but it's a really nice photograph,
showing this plot right here in the center of trees,
and this winds up being a foci or a focus of regeneration,
where recovery occurs.
Planting in patches is, of course,
much less labor and resource intensive,
you're planting fewer trees,
but it also copies the natural regeneration process.
So if you leave a pasture like this
to recover of its own accord,
what usually happens is
something like this shrub will colonize
and that will facilitate the colonization of other species.
And over time, you wind up getting
this progression of trees and species coming in
and coalescing into a recovered habitat.
So that patchy recovery
is just how the natural process takes place.
And so we're trying to, in effect, mimic that process
but give it a little boost.
And then the last point is one of the questions
or the topics that really interests me in restoration,
is our legacy effect.
So what are we doing on the ground,
and how does that impact
the trajectory of species over time?
In other words, if you're planting four species of trees,
which is what we did in our study,
but if you're planting it across thousands of hectares,
that's likely gonna leave a very strong footprint
or thumbprint on the land for a long time,
because those species are gonna regenerate
and they're going to basically maybe preclude
or not facilitate the recovery of other species coming in
simply cause you've got a uniform canopy (indistinct).
So reducing that legacy effect
is a really key issue in restoration.
Looking at applied nucleation in a little bit more detail.
We have a number of questions
that we're looking at in this project.
Does applied nucleation enhance recovery similarly
as does plantation or passive restoration,
which is the same as saying natural regeneration?
What's that ideal island size for these plots?
What about islands expanding,
do they really expand or do they just get stuck?
And how does this recovery shift over the long term?
So restoration is not an overnight process.
Even in the tropics it takes time.
And so we need to look at this over longer time spans
and look at these questions of legacy
and how these systems change after the first few years.
We also looked at, or are looking at, the landscape level.
And here we're looking at
whether recovery is more strongly affected
by within-site restoration strategy,
i.e. what we do on the ground.
Do we plant a bunch of trees, do we not plant,
do we plant in patches
versus what's the surrounding landscape doing?
If we have a lot of forest,
as you see in this image right here,
versus very little forest,
does that have a strong impact on recovery?
There are many publications
that have come from this project to date,
over 50 thus far on a whole range of topics.
I'm obviously not going to go through all of them today,
but just to give you all a sense
of the breadth of work and the importance
of, I should say, collaboration,
as many of these thematic areas
were led by other scientists.
In terms of site recovery,
I wanted to give you a visual image.
Over here is a person standing for scale.
This is a plot at time zero with the trees planted there.
And then this is that same plot eight years or so later,
this wall of trees is really your plantation.
And then the foreground here is your control
or your natural regeneration.
You can see that it's still stifled with grass, right?
So there's a big difference, you know, from here to here,
even though time zero was exactly the same, right?
Another site with natural regeneration,
this one not so overrun by grasses.
An artist rendition,
you can see a typical natural regeneration plot
with some recruits of trees, a few big ones,
a lot of grass still in the understory,
but it's coming back, right?
Plantation, open understory,
which is not what some people expect.
This is what it looks like in the artist's rendition.
Again, you can see these rows of trees here,
but you do have recruits and other species
that are outside of those rows as well.
And then islands,
a hybrid, obviously, between the two systems.
Some rows of trees, also some natural recruits,
a little bit of grass remaining,
and some open understory as well.
This is what a typical site looked like a few years ago.
This is drone imagery looking at
basically a canopy height model here.
Your dark green on the far left there under the plantation
is your higher canopy, taller canopy, 20 meters or so.
And then on the far right,
you've got your applied nucleation,
you've got your patches of trees
that are really kind of coalesced on the two sides, right?
And then you've got an open area in between here
of area that hasn't been colonized as yet.
But there is growth, and merging of these two islands.
And then natural regeneration, several patches of trees,
but again, a lot of open areas with fairly low elevation.
Canopy cover highlighted in blue here
comparing applied nucleation to plantation as a mean,
and you can see, you know,
it does lag a little bit behind the plantation,
but it's not that far behind.
And bit shorter in stature overall,
because you've got these open spaces
that you're also sensing in there.
But certainly what you can see from here
is that they do expand and grow,
because the original area planted was 18%.
Let's dig a little bit deeper into the data here.
So look at that question of early indicators.
In other words, do we plant or do we not plant?
On your left-hand side here is a graph
showing above-ground biomass accumulation.
And the three different treatments,
they'll be arranged in this way in all of my slides,
so your natural regeneration,
your island, and your plantation
split into two categories here.
Your natural regeneration, natural recruitment,
so this is species that are coming in
and germinating and establishing naturally in black,
and then your clear bars are your planted trees.
And so, not surprisingly, plantation wins at seven years
in terms of above-ground biomass,
islands are intermediate,
and control or natural generation
is a little further behind.
What is perhaps more surprising, however,
are these error bars.
So these big error bars basically indicate
that there's a huge disparity,
not only across the treatments,
but also within the treatment.
So in other words, when you go from one site to the next,
the plantation in some cases has done really well
and in other cases not so well.
And what that means, here are the numbers,
it's an order of magnitude difference
in terms of accumulation.
What that means is that some sites
really facilitate recovery,
the species grow very quickly and so on,
and other sites not so much.
We took this information
and plotted it out on this figure here.
And if you're looking at this on your X axis,
you've got height of your seedlings in year two
and above-ground biomass in year eight.
And if you plot this on this graph like this,
what you get is seedlings
that grew very little in the first couple of years,
wound up contributing very little to above-ground biomass.
Whereas seedling that were rocking, essentially,
in the first couple of years
and had a height of two and a half meters after two years,
with a few exceptions, really generated
a lot of above-ground biomass by year eight.
So what that means is you can test sites for productivity
or their ability to grow early on.
Whatever is going on in those first few years
is gonna be replicated 10 years later.
So you could do little test plantings in broad landscapes
to evaluate what your potential return is going to be,
and then before you do a large investment
of aggressive intervention only to find
that it's not gonna be successful.
Another way of looking at this
is to look at the natural regeneration plots
across that same time span.
So here we're looking at one and a half years
after sites were let go.
And we had some sites with still very high grass cover
and very few seedlings
versus other natural regeneration plots
with lesser amounts of grass cover and many more seedlings.
And as you would predict having seen the previous figure,
what happens here is a similar condition.
The ones with few seedlings wind up with few trees,
the ones with a lot of seedlings have a lot of trees
and a lot more rapid recovery.
So even without planting in the ground,
you can look at a site and say,
okay, I'm just gonna let this go for a couple of years
and see what happens.
And if it starts bouncing back quickly,
you probably don't need to do anything,
or maybe you need to just do some targeted planting.
But if you don't have movement,
as in that image I showed you
earlier on in the talk in Panama,
then probably some more active intervention is necessary.
What do we stick in the ground
is another really key question.
And to address that, at least partially,
I'm gonna look at this figure here.
This is your litterfall,
so this is your productivity of your,
it's an indirect measure
of productivity of growth in these systems.
And you can see here that at five years in the survey,
you've got plantation way ahead, islands intermediate,
natural regeneration far behind.
The color code here, again,
similar to that previous figure
but with a little bit more detail.
Yellow are other dicots,
so this is all naturally recruiting species,
and then these other colors
represent the four planted species,
the blues and the greens.
And what you see here
is your plantation in those early years
is completely dominated by the planted species we have.
Jump forward another five or six years
and look what happens.
Your second survey, your islands have caught up
in terms of productivity as to the plantation,
no significant difference, right?
But the makeup of that productivity is very different.
So half of the litterfall here is made up of other dicots.
In other words, a lot more diversity of species
contributing to the productivity in that system
compared to the plantation.
So think back to that legacy question again
that I mentioned at the very beginning.
And then natural regeneration far behind,
although it's steadily progressing, right?
So what does that mean?
Well, one way of looking at this is,
do we want to sequester carbon?
If that's the case,
probably going to plantations makes the most sense.
but if you're looking at composition or biodiversity,
maybe islands or even, if you have even more time,
natural regeneration makes more sense, right?
So these are some of the ways
you try and address these questions,
hopefully at a smaller scale
before doing things in huge areas.
Let's look at the critters,
and specifically focus on birds here for a little bit.
Not surprisingly, birds like infrastructure,
and here you're looking at
frugivorous bird abundance on your Y axis,
and they like the planted treatments more
than they do control.
They also had a very, whoops,
they had a very unexpected landscape effect.
So here on your X axis for, again,
frugivore detections or nectarivores on the C panel.
You've got tree cover on your X axis here from zero to 100,
surrounding tree cover that is,
and number of individuals.
And what you see here is the more forest cover you have
in the surrounding landscape,
the fewer birds you find.
Which is not what you would expect,
you'd think intuitively that the more forest,
the happier the birds,
and this required a bit of head scratching for a while
until I came up with this fantastic hypothesis
of the only bar in town hypothesis.
So basically if the only place
to hang out in town is this bar here
and you really need to have a beer,
this is where you're gonna go.
If there are a lot of other places with some better habitat,
then you probably will go there
over an early young restoration treatment.
That's not to say the pattern won't change with time,
but certainly at this point in the study,
this was the pattern that (indistinct).
So, let's see what these birds are doing.
Similar to the pattern I showed you in those graphs,
when you're looking at animal-dispersed tree seeds,
which make up the vast majority of trees in the system,
this is the pattern you get.
Plantation has the highest signal, islands are intermediate,
not statistically significant from plantation,
and then the controls or natural regeneration
lags pretty far behind here.
We have no effective surrounding forest cover
on incoming seeds.
So basically whether you have a lot of forest
or a little forest made no difference
in the number of seeds per meter squared for you.
Jump forward a bit more, now we're in 2012, 2013,
looking at seed rain again,
here split into smaller-seeded species
and larger-seeded species.
Smaller-seeded species are early successional species.
These are species that are much more common
in the landscape typically speaking
and are, as you can see from this figure,
not different across, in this case, four treatments.
So natural regen, island, plantations,
and R is for reference forest.
Large-seeded species,
which are your late successional species,
which are your hardwoods, slower-growing species,
there is a really distinct pattern here
where you see the reference forest
statistically higher number of seeds
per meter square per year,
then come your two planted treatments,
and then lagging far behind is your natural regeneration.
Again, this is a log scale,
so these are big differences
in terms of the number of seeds,
basically an order of magnitude difference.
We also looked at seedling recruits.
So that's what we see in these two panels down here,
and we have exactly the same pattern
if you split your recruits
between small-seeded recruits and large-seeded recruits.
So in other words,
what's going on in terms of germination and establishment,
we still have the same pattern
for your early-successional species,
but a very different pattern
for these later-successional species.
So that's interesting because
there isn't another filter overall
in terms of what's coming in in seedlings.
Once again, no effective surrounding forest cover found.
And this pattern repeated itself
in many, many different analyses we did.
And this generated a bit of noise,
because obviously a lot of studies show
that surrounding forest cover is an important metric
to consider in restoration.
So I'll get back to that in just a second.
Last slide here relating to seedlings and recruitment
is what are the species looking like?
What's in your composition?
And what you're looking at here on this left figure,
orange is your control or your natural regeneration
and your number of samples,
and it basically reaches an asymptote here.
Your two planted treatments are very similar
in the number of species,
start to level off, but not quite.
And then your reference forest is obviously flying out
and would be way up here, presumably, in this projection.
We sampled fewer sites in the reference forest.
Likewise, that rank-abundance curve
that you're looking at here.
Your natural regeneration's a much steeper curve
and peters out at around 40 species.
Your two planted treatments have a much longer curve
with a lot of rare species there,
which is really important to capture.
And then of course your reference forest
with only, whatever it is, half the number of samples,
still outcompeting in terms of overall number of species.
So, what about that forest cover?
Well, could it be that local factors are more important,
so what we do on the ground overrides everything else,
even if we have forest cover surrounding these plots or not?
Or could it be an alternate hypothesis
whereby the categorization of forest cover
into basically just a presence
or absence format is problematic?
And that is, the way we did this is
we just kind of band around these plots where we said,
okay, you've got 30% forest cover, 60%, 80%,
and we ran that as a covariant with our models
and determined whether forest cover was an important factor.
I felt that that was probably too simplistic.
And so instead of that,
what we really needed to do is go out into this forest
and figure out are these trees,
identify them to species level
and then see what's in here in the plot.
And so look at spacial distribution, look at abundance,
and also look at life history traits of these mother trees
on recruitment in our restoration forest.
To do that we picked eight sites,
shown here, of our 13.
At each one, we just focused on the plantation
shown here in red in this grid.
And we mapped out all the trees in the surrounding landscape
and identified them to species level.
This wound up being about 77 tree species
that we included in the study.
And we then did a comprehensive survey
of all recruits in these plots here in each plantation plot
and came up with about 1500 mother trees,
9,000 recruits overall in this step.
And what did we find?
Well, the first stop is just the simple presence
of a mother tree, right here,
within 100 meters of a plot, a plantation plot,
increased tenfold the probability
or the abundance on average of recruits upon specifics.
So in other words,
having a mother tree within your system
is a really important factor.
That's not that surprising,
but it's nice to see that result
when you're incorporating
more than 70 species into your model.
What we also found is that abundance of those mother trees
was also important.
So here on your X axis
you've got increasing number of mother trees
and on your Y axis, number of hypothetical recruits.
And we've broken this out into three bands,
so a 25-meter band,
so your band closest to your plot, your target plot,
and then a 50-meter band and a 75-meter band.
And what you can see is if the mother trees
have a lot of individuals within 25 meters
and those numbers start going up, this takes off, right?
So if we were to have 75 mother trees within our plots,
which is highly unlikely,
but then you'd wind up with 1000 recruits
in your system, right?
So that's how this model is,
what it's projecting.
The third piece of this study
is that proximity of mother trees to the plot is important.
So that 25-meter band is important,
but so is being really, really close to the plot.
So here we're looking at your closest distance,
so here's mean distance of a mother tree to a plot.
If it's super duper close
you have have that many more seedlings
than when it's 100 meters away.
And this signal was much stronger for larger-seeded species,
shown here with a solid bar,
than for smaller-seeded species.
And this is one example where the mother tree
was maybe five meters away from this plot,
it was the only mother tree of the species,
and you can see the overwhelming signal it has
in terms of recruits in that system.
So, contrary to many of our previous studies,
if you look at this appropriately at the right resolution,
forest cover and its proximity to plots is really important,
but you have to look at it at the appropriate level.
And then what's also really important
is the composition of that forest around there.
So if you have good diversity
and so on surrounding your plots,
then you're in pretty good shape,
'cause a lot of that
is probably gonna come into your restoration sites.
And that could be something you assess
prior to doing large-scale restoration,
just to know what's what's out there.
So I'm gonna close with three take-home messages here.
One is this question of how to.
And I've talked a lot about that
in this presentation already,
but one key question that hasn't been addressed
is this one right here.
Do we plant these, whatever this is, nine plots, like this,
or do we plant it like this?
And obviously that has major implications
for the area that you can cover in restoration
if you get the same result doing this
versus just having everybody clustered together,
but that needs to be properly assessed
to make that determination.
The second point is what do we plant?
And again, I alluded to this a little bit,
but I didn't go into it in much detail.
But a very clear example in this same study
is that of the four species we planted in this study,
two were wind dispersed, shown here.
One had explosive dispersal and the fourth has a red seed,
but it's not really consumed by birds
because it's poisonous to some and it doesn't have a reward.
So essentially none of our trees
were really animal dispersed per se,
and so you're losing that potential connection to network.
Your plant-animal interactions are reduced to,
well, this is a scaffolding, basically,
in the landscape, right?
So it might be much more important
to plant something like this this,
Ficus or figs are really important
keystone species in tropical systems,
consumed by dozens of different species of birds,
by bats, by mammals, all kinds of species.
And so planting them and having them
fruit at some point in this process
would really bring in a lot of other species
and attract your dispersers even more.
And then the third point is this question of persistence.
And I'll go back to those pledges
that I talked about at the very beginning,
where you have all these massive global efforts
to bring millions and millions of hectares of degraded land
into restoration with these fantastic targets in place.
But what we've discovered is a rather unsettling issue here,
and we go back to the same plot that I showed you earlier.
This study that I'm gonna talk about now
basically looked at this area here
and all these tiny little patches of forest
all throughout this landscape,
1700 secondary forest patches in all,
and looked at their longevity
or their persistence over time.
And what we found was rather unsettling.
And that is that you started out
with these 1700 patches or so,
within 20 years, half of those patches have been recleared.
Within 35 years, 3/4 were gone.
And by the time you go out
to the length of the study that we looked at
and the time-lapse that we have in imagery,
almost 90% of these secondary forests have gone.
So the biggest take-home I can give from this talk
is to reevaluate these major commitments as nation states,
as government and entities
and non-government organizations working in this regard.
And I'll pick on Costa Rica
just because this whole talk was about Costa Rica,
but Costa Rica pledged a million hectares
of restored forest by 2020.
In effect, that's a million hectares
of zero-year-old forest, right?
But the real pledge should be something like this,
one million hectares of 100 year old forest by 2120,
because that implies all the funding,
all the monitoring, safeguarding of these restored areas
for a long time span,
where you can a pure carbon sequestration, biodiversity,
and all these other ecosystem functions
that we're trying to restore
and be able to really say we actually restored forest
as opposed to we actually just planted
a million hectares of trees.
And with that,
I will thank many funders and collaborators
who weren't on the first slide.
And I guess I won't be taking any questions
because there's no (indistinct),
but thank you very much.
- Thanks very much, Dr. Zahawi.
Actually, I have two quick questions
before I stop the recording. - Please do.
- One's at a sort of global scale.
Are you optimistic about the bond challenge
and whether we are making solid progress
in restoring ecosystems like you describe?
- I think that's an excellent question.
And I've been in the field now for 25, 30 odd years,
depending on where you start the count
in terms of my efforts and work in this field,
both as a non-professional and then as a professional,
and what I see is a sea change
in how government organizations
and how the world is focused on conservation efforts
and in this case restoration
and in doing so at these enormous scales.
And there's a lot of interest in it
and a lot of funding and many different initiatives,
not just in land restoration, even marine efforts.
I mean, you know, I'm talking to you here from Ecuador,
from the Galapagos,
where there was recent declaration of a new marine reserve
that's 60,000 square kilometers
with significant infrastructure being put in place
to be able to monitor and manage that system going forward.
So I see a lot of promise in the conversations we're having
and that there's suddenly
almost a glut of funding, if you will.
What's missing is the ability,
you know, and what I talked about here in my presentation,
of really being able to answer that call properly.
And then this last slide that I talked about,
I think one of the biggest weaknesses
is this inability to really underscore
the importance of restoration as a long-term process.
And it doesn't just involve two years
of planting a zillion trees in the ground.
I mean, I've been on funding,
not boards, but recommendations,
where basically there's one year of funding
and all they were interested in
was how many trees do you buy?
And I said, you might as well not even give the funds
because it's just you're gonna lose 98% of your seeds.
- Yeah, it's a whole change in mindset, isn't it?
- Total change in your mindset.
And the problem is,
the most attractive thing is to say,
well, we planted 10,000 trees.
It's not very exciting to say,
well, we've gone out and monitored them for 25 years
and they're growing, you know?
I mean, but you could make that more exciting,
we have to work at that.
You have to talk about,
well, we've sequestered so tons of carbon
as a result of this effort that was started 25 years ago,
or we suddenly have 350 species in this system
where there was once 10 species of grass,
and, you know, that kind of approach.
- My second question is, clearly the Galapagos
where you're currently stationed
is quite a different ecosystem.
Are you able to use any of the knowledge
that you gained in your studies in Costa Rica
for your work at the Charles Darwin Foundation
and on the Galapagos?
- As with everything, the answer is yes and no.
Certainly I have a lot of experience,
field experience and understanding,
and some of that can be applied here.
The trick with Galapagos is it's an island system,
so you have to put on your lens of Hawaii
when you're working here.
And in other words,
for those who don't know a lot about island systems,
they're much more fragile.
You've got a lot of endemic species,
they've been isolated from mainland systems
for evolutionary time,
and in many cases, they are unable to compete for resources
the same way forest systems can in Costa Rica or wherever.
And so what I talked about
where you have a degree of resilience
in these systems in Costa Rica,
you do not have that in the Galapagos.
So you can't just say,
okay, we're going to clear the system
and all these native species are gonna come back.
They're not.
The problem with the Galapagos
is you've got very aggressive invasive species
and you have to actually manage that.
And so it's a different set of criteria
that need to be implemented here.
The good thing is with this large-scale funding
and long-term funding
you can actually join a lot of these efforts together.
So you can bring in funds that's long-term,
such as carbon offset funding, for example,
and do intervention in the Galapagos over the long term,
much like you would do intervention in Costa Rica
for 10 or 15 years until the system is getting into effect,
but it would be a lot more maintenance
and it would be a lot more expensive.
- Well thanks very much for your time, Dr. Zahawi,
and your kindness and generosity
in allowing us to sort of rerecord this.