Costa Rica Acoustic Monitoring Dataset - Nicoya

Costa Rica’s Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) program issues payments to local landowners to encourage forest recovery and compensate them for lost opportunity costs. Most payments subsidize land conservation, in which participants allow forests to naturally regenerate. Some payments are also offered to produce timber through plantations, which are often monocultures of exotic tree species. Despite the PSA’s importance to Costa Rica’s conservation efforts, little is known about whether these forest systems within the PSA are recovering their natural biodiversity. Using acoustic monitoring data, we find evidence that naturally regenerated forests within the PSA have recovered substantially, while plantation systems lag behind. To investigate the dynamics of the PSA program, we recorded 6-day soundscapes in 142 sites across the Nicoya Peninsula (Figure 1). Specifically, we characterized the soundscapes across 4 treatment types: (i) 20 degraded pastures, (ii) 51 PSA monoculture tree plantations, (iii) 50 PSA natural regeneration, and (iv) 20 intact natural reference forests. By determining the areas of acoustic space most relevant for ecological comparisons, we could identify how and to what extent the natural regeneration sites and plantations had changed over the last 30 years. These findings reaffirm the importance of ecosystem restoration to combat biodiversity loss and provide support for the expansion of redistributive mechanisms to accelerate restoration at scale.