Country

Costa Rica: 5 ecoregions. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Five ecoregions divide Costa Rica, four of them forest of the moist tropical kind. The Isthmian-Atlantic moist forests face the Caribbean, the Isthmian-Pacific moist forests and Costa Rican seasonal moist forests the Pacific, and between them rise the Talamancan montane forests, a Half Protected highland core. The northwest is different: Central American dry forests bring a genuine dry season to Guanacaste. That arrangement gives the country its trademark compression, wet lowland rain forest, seasonally dry forest, and cool cloud-forest conditions within tens of miles. Gardeners can grow almost anything tropical somewhere in Costa Rica, but siting is everything: heat-and-humidity lovers belong on the Caribbean side, drought-deciduous species in the northwest, and cool-growing epiphytes and understory plants in the mountains.