Dear Lord, I need a machete
Walking through understory of a Costa Rican rainforest is a serious task. Weaving in and out of vines, climbing over fallen trees and fighting to move around the rest of the vegetation. This is taking more time than I expected. At one point I felt a burning sting in my shoulder, a vine with sharp claws suck into my shoulder while another left a long scratch across my arm. I need a machete. Trampling over the vegetation in my way, my partner, Savannah Bryson, and I attempted to reach all of the native tree species Conostegia xalapensis in order to obtain DBH and % lichen coverage. In one transect, we needed to trek nearly 10 meters from the trail to assess a tree all but concealed behind a wall of dreadful vines. This is a limitation of our study, accessibility. We also had to adjust a few transects to fall on one side of the trail because of the treacherous terrain. Understory was not the only thing standing in our way, however, there were encounters with spiders, bugs and bees.
Fighting the vegetation is one thing, but the bees are another. They are large and fast, buzzing like a bullet for your head. I spent much of my energy slashing my arms wildly in hope they would, well, buzz off. Maybe I don’t need a machete. I could see my rage of toward the bee being mistakenly brought down on my own person, or, God forbid, my partner. No. I would have to deal with the bees and the vines, moving through the forest with as little impact as possible.
Sweaty and exhausted we finished each day of data collection by counting inflorescences of the invasive species Musa velutina (velvet pink banana) and Zingiber spectabile (beehive ginger). This also took longer than expected. Total counts started from the furthest point of each transect along the Ridge, Mellissa and Water trails, merging at the Rio Java. An entire morning was dedicated to counting the number of inflorescences along the Rio Java trail alone. 940 Z. spectabile and 59 M. velutina.
A one-way anova showed that DBH of C. xalapensis was significant between the youngest (pasture) and oldest forest (primary forest) where p= 0.008. This was to be expected. Unfortunately there was not a notable change in lichen type or coverage. The presence of lichens through all three habitat types did, however, indicate forest health.
Invasive species showed a pattern that was also expected. There were a higher number of inflorescences closer to the population sources in the Wilson Botanical Garden. The beehive ginger does well in shaded areas (Wolff, Astuti and Brink, 1999) which was supported by the map, which we produced using ArcGIS. Beehive ginger appeared more often than the velvet pink banana did in areas of high canopy cover. The velvet pink banana required full sunlight with plenty of water (Nelson, Ploetz, and Kepler, 2006) which was also supported by the creation of the map, the banana occurred most often in the open canopy of the pasture and near the light gap of streams. Over all the velvet pink banana occurred most in the 0-15% canopy coverage interval and the beehive ginger fell under 30-45% canopy cover interval.
These results may not give us the characteristics we were looking for to describe forest succession, but it was a good start. We have begun to think more critically about our methods and the scope of our overall objective. Over all, I believe that Savanna and I are pleased with the work we were able to complete in the time we had available. We appreciate the experience to become more practiced with our methods and testing our abilities in the field.
Until next time,
Pura Vida
Nelson, S. C., Ploetz, R. C., & Kepler, A. K. (2006). Musa species (banana and plantain). Species profiles for Pacific Island agroforestry, 15.
Wolff, X.Y., Astuti, I.P. & Brink, M., 1999. Zingiber G.R. Boehme [Internet] Record from Proseabase. de Guzman, C.C. and Siemonsma, J.S. (Editors). PROSEA (Plant Resources of South East Asia) Foundation, Bogor, Indonesia.http://www.proseanet.org. [Accessed 23 May 2016]