Activity

David: We’ve had some activity out here at QERC, which is great news for the month of September. September is slow and rainy for everybody around here. But, against the normal trend, we had two groups staying with us this weekend.

The first group was seven LASP students who were simply here for a weekend to enjoy the cloud forest. Technically, that makes them tourists. But because we have such a close relationship with LASP we’ve taken the liberty to host them anyway. Nevertheless, they had a great weekend and enjoyed God’s creation.

The other group we had here was a Costa Rican married couple who are working on their PhD research. Juan and Melissa have been here in the past and will return again to complete their project. It is nice to continue a working relationship with them and see their project develop. They have chosen 3-4 communities in the Los Santos area to see if they can link forest conservation to a higher quality of living for those in the surrounding communities. It is an important idea because if well done research shows a correlation between a higher quality of living with conservation of natural environments, then communities can be encouraged to pursue conservation. Melissa works on the social aspect of the project in order to determine the quality of life within each community and Juan does the biological work to determine how much land is conserved while specifically looking at bird populations to determine disturbance of the natural environment. It is a 2-3 year project.

One of our overall goals is to make QERC an educationally interactive experience for anyone that walks onto our property whether they may be students, tourists, or neighbors. We feel like we’ve made some progress in doing this and it is a fun goal to have.

One of the projects we are hoping to have done before January is the native plant demonstration. Three sides of our building have flower beds with pretty ornamental flowers. What we are doing is tearing those out, cleaning up the beds, and replacing them with native plants that represent different areas of in the forest. The idea is that we will identify these plants, with the help of some botanists at The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica, and put signs by the plants that have the family name, species name, and common name both in Spanish and English. We would love to see people walking around the building looking at the plants and learning a little at the same time. And when they hike in the forest the plants will catch their eyes and they will think to themselves with great satisfaction, “I know that plant. It is part of the Laladadabingbong family.”

Anyway, in the mornings we drive up into the forest and collect plants that fit into the overall scheme of our planting plan. It has been a lot of work along the way. We’ve had to redo much of the rock border and work around the rain. We just hope that all the plants make it.