Community Outreach, Environmental Education, Land Conservation and Forest Restoration, Sustainable agriculture / 24.08.2020

Blog by: Hilary Brumberg, Ridge to Reef Program Interim Director Southern Costa Rica is home to two of the most important areas to conserve in Central America: the Osa Peninsula and the Talamanca Mountains. The Osa Peninsula is the most biodiverse region of Costa Rica and contains Corcovado National Park and Piedras Blancas National Park. Deemed one of Mesoamerica’s “5 great forests,” the Talamanca Mountains contain the largest altitudinal variation in a protected area complex in Central America. The mountain range hosts La Amistad International Park, which spans from...

Science and Research, Sustainable agriculture / 15.10.2019

Blogpost By Ali Ruxin Research Field Assistant.  Agriculture and conservation are often at odds; at Osa Conservation we’re trying to change that. Through agroecology, we consider the entire ecosystem of our surroundings to produce food in ways that are sustainable for the environment, consumer, and producer. In practice, this means techniques like harvesting corn and then cutting and shredding the stalks to use as mulch on a bed of cherry tomatoes. It means creating bio-insecticides from chilies, papaya leaves, ginger, lemongrass, and gavilana found around the farm to control...

Land Conservation and Forest Restoration, Science and Research, Sustainable agriculture / 21.02.2019

By Marvin Lopez Morales, Botanic Assistant Not long ago, the Costa Rican ethnobotanist Jorge Luis Poveda visited Osa Conservation. For me, it was an honor and pleasure to meet him.  Luis Poveda in the forest during his visit to our Conservation campus. Photo credit: Osa Conservation A simple and very friendly person, he has so many stories to tell about his personal experiences, plants, and teaching a wide variety of people. Poveda has devoted many years of his professional career to projects against cancer, Costa Rican Trees, and Manual of Plants...

Community Outreach, Land Conservation and Forest Restoration, Sustainable agriculture / 28.11.2018

Blogpost by Charlotte Watteyn, doctoral researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Costa Rica, collaborating with Osa Conservation If you think about vanilla, you immediately start to imagine delicious ice creams, cakes and other yummy sweets. But where does this vanilla come from? Well, it is extracted from the fruits (beans or pods) of orchid vines, producing an intense aroma resulting from a complex of molecules. These orchids belong to the genus Vanilla (Orchidaceae), a diverse group of climbing hemi-epiphytes growing around trees with their aerial roots. The...

Sustainable agriculture / 28.06.2017

Blogpost written by Mollie Carroll, Intern Most of us never think past the walls of the grocery store when it comes to our food. And, we definitely don’t often go as far as to think about the practices used to produce it. Yet, in an ever modernizing world, we should stop for a moment to question what really goes into making the food that we eat every day and ask ourselves, "What's the deal with sustainable agriculture?" In the United States, the amount of farms has drastically decreased as yield...

Miscellaneous, Sustainable agriculture, Volunteers and Visitors / 13.11.2015

Our Finca Osa Verde consists of 600 acres of pasture and forest, as well as 1.1 miles of sea turtle nesting habitat. Osa Verde includes a small farm that supplies Osa Conservation’s field station kitchen and dining halls with all types of fruits and veggies; from lettuce, to peppers, yucca, bananas, and rice. This week we collected peanuts from the Finca Osa farm and volunteers, research assistants, and staff members joined forces to create organic peanut butter for the very first time. The process is quite simple and the peanut butter...