Crops of Volunteers Keep Research Project Growing

For the price of almost $1,495, volunteers are paying to save the rain forests of Costa Rica. The work is unglamorous, gritty and occasionally so monotonousness that excitement is watching the trees grow.

No matter.

If you grow them, they will come. The newest summer crop of paying volunteers is reporting for tree-measuring duty today at the Coto Brus farm of UC Irvine ecology professor Frances Lynn Carpenter.

Carpenter’s farm, 63 acres of degraded cattle pasture land, lies in the southwest of Costa Rica near the Panamanian border. The gentle green slopes of her property are already planted with thousands of native trees, an experiment to test new strategies for raising a rain forest from land damaged by herbicides, cattle grazing and erosion.

The vacation brochure for the project doesn’t dwell on the farm’s spectacular views of the Pacific and Golfo Dulce. Instead it entices with: “Volunteers will plant seedlings of different species and measure a wide array of soil and plant characteristics as well as monitor seedlings planted in 1993.”

The Berkeley-based University Research Expeditions Program--which offers volunteers for University of California researchers--is organizing the effort to support Carpenter’s project. Along with the volunteer labor, Carpenter also receives a portion of the vacation fee to subsidize her research.

She has relied largely on volunteers in the early stage of her experiment as she still tries to tap foundation sources to fund her 20-year project.

“It’s really these volunteers who have gotten the project going,” Carpenter said. “I couldn’t have gotten started without them.”

Volunteers have built her tree nursery, planted seedlings, climbed to treetops, and even built their own beds. Some volunteers are simply friends who came on their own to help out. Others learned about Carpenter’s work through her classroom lectures at UCI or an overheard conversation at a supermarket checkout line.

Devon Biggs, a Costa Rican Peace Corps worker from Wisconsin, literally scaled the treetops for Carpenter last year in search of fresh, pristine seeds to germinate seedlings.

Why?

“I’m not an idealist. I think my personal philosophy is that it’s obvious the destruction of the forest is going to take place,” Biggs said. “I guess everybody has to do what they can and that’s why I’m here.”