TOPIC 4
Forests of Costa Rica Holdridge Life Zones Map
BACKGROUND The geographical position, the proximity of the oceans, and the orography define the environmental conditions for a variety of environments to exist, in which the vegetation over the years has developed and today it is admired as forests. This richness and diversity has been studied by many researchers, who adopted non-tropical classification systems to "classify forests". However, it was with the proposal of the ecologist Leslie Holdridge, that a vegetation classification system was established for the country. Using this life zone classification system, a description of the 12 life zones is presented, together with a reference to the tree species. These cover the types of forests classifying them into: humid, very humid, dry, pluvial forests, and páramo, according to the height above sea level in which they are located, average annual rainfall and temperature. Forest Ecosystems One of the most used systems for classifying forests is the Holdridge Life Zones, which divides Costa Rica into 12 life zones and 12 transition zones, based on environmental factors such as humidity, precipitation and temperature; the result is the division of the country into different types of forest. According to this classification, the five main forests in terms of extension in Costa Rica are:
Credit: Christian Birkel and Joni Dehaspe, (University of Costa Rica.)
1 - Very humid tropical forest 2 - Very humid premontane forest 3 - Lower montane rain forest 4 - Premontane rainforest 5 - Tropical humid forest
