ABSTRACT
Since the late 1940s Costa Rica has suffered from a severe change in its dense tropical forest vegetation cover and agroecosystem distribution (Sader and Joyce, 1988; Sánchez-Azofeifa, 1997; Van Omme et al., 1998). Over the past decades the original area covered by tropical premontane rain forest, or lower montane moist forest, has been reduced significantly due to forest conversion for agricultural land. Since the late 1960s and particularly throughout the 1980s, degraded or unproductive agricultural lands such as lowland and montane pastures have been abandoned and have given way to successional processes leading to a large area at present covered by secondary forests (Holl and Kappelle, 1999). Simultaneously, the area covered by traditional crops, such as banana, in some regions was reduced due to economic recessions by the mid 1980s. Other areas have lost coffee plantations as a result of the increased extension of urban areas such as Costa Rica’s central valley. In order to understand the processes related to these intense land cover changes and the consequences for biodiversity conservation, we recognize a need to map the current vegetation types present in the country.
