The author’s first experience in Costa Rica began as a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University when he came to Costa Rica to participate in a course offered through the Organization for Tropical Studies in the Fundamentals of Tropical Ecology. After completing his coursework, he returned to Costa Rica to engage in research for his Master’s thesis, and, subsequently, for his Ph.D. dissertation research as part of his program of studies at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry at Syracuse University. During this time, he was associated with a project conducted by the Tropical Science Center of San Jose, Costa Rica for which study sites were established to study the primary forest in 46 locations selected to encompass forest vegetation typical of 10 Life Zones and associations thereof scattered throughout Costa Rica. In 1966, aerial photography with four different films was acquired over the study sites at scales of 1:5,000 and 1:20,000.

When returning to Costa Rica on vacation during the early 1970’s, he visited several of these study sites and observed that the original forest had been altered or converted to other land uses. This observation motivated the author to continue monitoring the study sites, but monitoring some of the sites was difficult due to their remote locations and inaccessibility by good roads. However, monitoring was facilitated by the 1972 launch of the first satellite of the Landsat satellite series from which the sensors provided images acquired over most of Costa Rica by the late 1970’s. The availability of images from the Landsat satellite series together with aerial photography acquired over Costa Rica made the continued monitoring of the 46 study sites feasible.

The aerial photography from 1966 together with the field observations in 1966 – 1968, subsequently became the base for monitoring land use change on the 46 study sites. In order to be more representative of the life zone for the particular study site, an area of 10 square kilometers with the original study site in the center was monitored. During the 40 years after 1966, a wide variety of remotely-sensed data acquired though other projects over Costa Rica were interpreted by the author to monitor land use change in the study sites. Some of the imagery interpreted for this study was acquired for NASA research projects for which the author was the Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator. One of these projects determined the relationships between deforestation and environmental factors in Costa Rica during the period of 1950 to 1983. This study showed deforestation to be highly correlated with road construction and environmental conditions related to life zone, soil, and slope. After this study, the author became interested in determining the manner in which social, economic, and legislative factors influenced deforestation and land use change in Costa Rica. Subsequently, the author began collecting statistics and information on socio-economic-legislative factors that appeared to be related to land use change, and added a second stage to the study with the objective of determining the nature of these relationships. At about the same time, the author became aware that the predictions of demand for forest products in Costa Rica up to 1990 that he made during his Ph.D. dissertation research based on data from 1955 to 1967 were incorrect by 1980. It was also apparent that predictions of deforestation and land use change by others were incorrect within 10 years or less after those predictions had been made. This observation lead to the formulation of another objective to determine why these predictions were incorrect and what could be learned in order to develop more accurate models of land use change.
The author made an effort to locate and cite publications that are relevant to the topics of this book. However, much of the information for this book was gained through conversations with Costa Rican friends and professional acquaintances, reading local newspapers, watching local TV, and observations during an accumulated total of 7 years of residence and extensive traveling throughout Costa Rica during the 40 years from 1966 to 2006.