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TROPICAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND HIGHER EDUCATION CENTER GRADUATE SCHOOL Dry season cattle grazing in the seasonally dry tropical forests of Costa Rica: importance in cattle ranching livelihoods and impacts on forest botanical composition and diversity By Florent Godinot Thesis submitted to the consideration of the Graduate School as a requisite for the degree of Magister Scientiae in Management and Conservation of Tropical Forests and Biodiversity Turrialba, Costa Rica 2019 ii Dedication To my family: Blandine Favre, Hubert Godinot, Coline and Benjamin Godinot To Claudia Arndt iii Acknowledgements To my family, Blandine Favre, Hubert Godinot, Coline and Benjamin Godinot, to whom I owe everything for their unconditional support throughout my life, for their involvement in fostering my personal, academical and professional development, and for the loving home that is at the core of my accomplishments today. To Claudia Arndt, my partner, who has been an invaluable although unofficial advisor in this thesis, but mostly for being at my side through the highs and lows of this process. Her help and love have allowed me to see this thesis to its term. To the farmers of Liberia county, who always received me with great hospitality and openness, and were almost always enthusiastic about participating in a research project. I hope this thesis can bring something positive to your lives. To the personnel of Horizontes, who has been like a family during my time in the field, and whose friendship and time spent on my project I value greatly. Thanks, in particular, to Pedro Alvarado, whose advice, joyful nature and care have been a tremendous help in making the best out of a busy and challenging fieldwork. Thanks to Milena Gutierrez Leitón, for lending me the precious time of Horizontes personnel to contribute to my project. To my advisors, Bryan Finegan, Eduardo Somarriba Chavez and Luis Diego Delgado Rodriguez, who always found a balance between letting this thesis project be my own and helping me with precious advice when I was lost. To my fellow students at CATIE, for the good times spent together, for the mutual help in this learning process and for being able to laugh together at the miseries brought on us by our respective thesis. This work was produced by CATIE as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors: cgiar.org/funders/. Thanks to them for the financial support provided. iv Biography The author was born in Lyon, France, in April 1990. He graduated in 2011 from the ESCD 3A Business and International Development School, with a specialty on NGO management and Latin America. Throughout his studies, he discovered a fascination for forests during a six-month internship in the Peruvian Amazon, in the small town of Tamshiyacu where he helped local craftspersons to establish a distribution channel to sell their forest seed-based handicraft. He realized how important the forest was in people’s everyday life, and decided to orient his career towards forest conservation. After working for a year at the forest conservation UK charity The Forest Trust, he went for a three-year trip through Latin America, working as a dive and kitesurf instructor. He then worked at the Fairtrade chocolate company Alter Eco in San Francisco, USA, for a year and a half, as a staff accountant. However, the need to spend time in forests doing fieldwork and understanding the role of forests and the services it provides in sustaining local livelihoods drove him to apply to CATIE’s Master’s Degree in Tropical Forests and Biodiversity Management and Conservation. The thesis subject presented in this volume is in the straight line of his research interests, as forests in Guanacaste provide a critical service to local farmers, and should be studied and understood. He now looks forward to develop and coordinate science-based conservation programs with local and international conservation organizations. v Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1 1 Background and justification ........................................................................................................................... 1 2 Objectives .................................................................................................................................................... 2 3 Conceptual framework .................................................................................................................................... 3 3.1 Central American Seasonally dry tropical forests ................................................................... 3 3.2 Livelihoods and cattle ranching in the Central American Dry corridor. ................................ 7 3.3 Browsing by cattle and vulnerability to fire in central American SDTFs ............................... 8 4 Main results .................................................................................................................................................. 10 4.1 Chapter I ............................................................................................................................... 10 4.2 Chapter II .............................................................................................................................. 12 5 Conclusions and recommendations ............................................................................................................... 13 6 Literature cited .............................................................................................................................................. 15 Chapter I: Secondary tropical dry forests are important to cattle ranchers in Northwestern Costa Rica. ............................................................................................................................................................ 22 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 24 2 Materials and Methods .................................................................................................................................. 25 2.1 Study area .............................................................................................................................. 25 2.2 Data Collection and Analysis ................................................................................................ 28 3 Results and Discussion .................................................................................................................................. 29 3.1 General considerations ......................................................................................................... 29 3.2 Farmland and cattle herd management ................................................................................. 30 3.3 Threats and challenges faced by ranchers ............................................................................ 32 3.4 Dry season feeding strategies and cattle in forests ............................................................... 34 3.5 Cattle behavior in forests ...................................................................................................... 43 3.6 Limitations of this study......................................................................................................... 47 4 Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................. 47 5 Literature cited .............................................................................................................................................. 49 Chapter II: Comparison of composition and diversity of protected and unprotected seasonally dry tropical forests in the cattle ranching landscape of Liberia county, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. .......... 54 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 55 2 Materials and methods................................................................................................................................... 57 2.1 Study area .............................................................................................................................. 57 2.2 Data collection ...................................................................................................................... 59 2.3 Statistical analysis ................................................................................................................. 61 3 Results .................................................................................................................................................. 63 3.1 General floristic composition ................................................................................................ 63 3.2 Secondary forest composition and its variation .................................................................... 64 3.3 Alpha diversity ....................................................................................................................... 69 3.4 Correlations between forest strata ........................................................................................ 72 4 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................