Day 4 – Biocultural Diversity

¡Un gran saludo a todos desde la naturalesa national!

Today, we visited the Parque Nacional Sarigua (Sarigua National Park) in the province of Herrera, to learn more about biocultural diversity. Biocultural diversity is the interconnected diversity of life such as culture and biology. This doesn’t refer to only people. When went to the national park, we learned that it also includes plants and landscapes.

In this 8,000 hectare protected area (1 hectare = 2 US football fields!), we learned that the reason why it’s covered in soil is because it’s an eroded and saline land. It was rainy today, so it was muddy. Almost like clay! This land contained Pre-Colombian remains dating back about 11,000 years, making it one of the oldest human settlements in Panama! We also learned that the color of the dirt reflected on the minerals in it, for example it could have iron, aluminum, zinc, and magnesium. The iron makes the soil red, the aluminum is the residue of the salt from the ocean that receded over time. The magnesium helped the reproduction of the land.

The park rangers having been making efforts to encourage the park’s recovery and support the return of vegetation. A good example of this is the shrimp farms that occupy more than 50% of the coastal area!

The group did a wonderful job at the national park and asked lots of questions that helped with us learning new things. So, afterwards we went to get ice cream at a local ice cream parlor. They had multiple unique flavors compared to the ice cream flavors in the United States.

The leaders of the day (Líderes del Dia) are writing this blog to you! Being the leader of the day meant a lot of responsibility and courage which we all preserved through together. We’ve had plenty encouragement and got lots of feedback on our strengths and weaknesses, which made it a huge learning experience on how to be better leaders for all of us!

All of things we were taught today helped our minds grow and strengthed our knowledge on community, culture, and biology! We hope to continue to learn more as we transfer into our CAP project (Community Action Project) over these next few days.

Thank you for reading!

Signed,

Brooklyn, Vanessa OH, and Presleigh