Costa Rica News – A tree planting initiative was launched in La Sabana in 2011.
Since then, 4,668 new trees have been planted. 5,000 are expected to be planted by 2019. 93% of the goal has already been met.
4,135 volunteers and 145 organizations put in a total of 18,895 hours of work. Five more volunteer days will be organized to finish the project.
The metropolitan park is to become an urban forest, with hundreds of native tree species developing their life cycle in the lung of the capital, attracting biodiversity. The park consists of 235 native species.
There are 1,400 tree species in Costa Rica and 16% of them can be seen all in one spot, La Sabana. It will be like a living museum. Students can go there to see rare species which used to require travel to Osa, for example.
The loss of new trees is at 1%, very low, since so many people are in favor of the project and the general public takes care of the trees. In the rest of San Jose, the losses are about 40% due to vandalism.
