Targeting Riparian Reforestation to Enhance Ecosystem Services: The Case of Costa Rica

As habitats degrade worldwide, there is an increasing need to protect and restore natural areas to safeguard benefits they provide for humans and biodiversity. Riparian corridors are key places to focus such efforts: they generate many essential ecosystem services, and often provide disproportionately high levels of services relative to their spatial extent. Many countries have laws protecting riparian buffers, but they often are not well-enforced. Using Costa Rica as a case study, we explore the consequences of implementing an existing riparian protection law, Forest Law 7575, which specifies an amount of natural habitat to be preserved around rivers. We model changes in nutrient retention, sediment retention, and carbon sequestration in both a baseline scenario, using current land use, and a simulated reforestation scenario, where riparian forests are increased as per law. We do this using InVEST, an open source software that creates spatially explicit maps of ecosystem services based on different land use scenarios.