by Suzanna Engman
photos by Jerry Bauer

The following is excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming book, Ecological Paradigms for the Tropics: Old Questions and Continuing Challenges, written by LTER scientists* and published by Oxford University Press. These excerpts are taken from the Introduction, by Ariel Lugo.

The natural history of the Luquillo Mountains spans over 30 million years, while human presence has been an influence over the past 2200 years. Humans arrived in Puerto Rico by island hopping from South America. Their activities modified the flora and fauna by introducing new species to Puerto Rico and causing the extinction of numerous animal species.

The Taíno Indians left rock carvings within the Luquillo Mountains that depict creatures or people, both alive and dead (dead people were represented as having their soul leaving the body above their heads). The writings of early European observers and subsequent inquiries suggested that the Taíno’s view of the Luquillo Mountains was both religious and pragmatic. To the Taíno people, the Luquillo Mountain area was a sacred place where the good god Yucahu or Yucayú resided and protected them from the bad god Mabuya or Juracán. The modern term hurricane originates from juracán in Taíno language. Long-term records of hurricane tracks show two lanes, to the north and south of Puerto Rico, with a high number of tracks and a lower number of hurricane tracks over the island. This pattern, locally known as the “Puerto Rico split,” gives some credence to the Taíno belief that the Luquillo Mountains somehow influenced the passage of hurricanes and protected their island.

Taínos also believed in totems and, possibly inspired by the Luquillo Mountains and the Central Cordillera, visualized the whole island as being carried by a large animal, which evolved into a figure with a human face and feet (Domínguez Cristóbal 2000). This animal figure is a cemí, sold today as a decoration and a tourist curiosity. The movement of the cemí was thought to contribute to the periodic earthquakes that affected the island.

Taínos used the Luquillo Mountains as a haven during their conflict with the Spanish conquistadors, who began an inventory of the island’s wood and minerals to exploit. These inventories represent the first description of the biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by the Luquillo Mountains and Puerto Rico. The Spanish government established a forest service in Puerto Rico (Inspección de Montes) between 1876 and 1889 to focus on timber production and land management, which began in the Luquillo Mountains by 1880. A tabonuco tree was valued at 1.50 pesos, while an ausubo tree was worth 2.25 pesos (in the 19th century, a Spanish peso was worth about 60 cents).

The Spanish government’s approach to forestry included the planned use of the forests and the protection of their watershed value. They passed laws and proclamations to protect the forest timber for the crown and also designated buffer areas along rivers and streams to protect water quality. A large area of the Luquillo Mountains, and other forest locations in Puerto Rico, were designated public forests in 1876, which was one of the earliest such designations in the western hemisphere. These actions anticipated modern understanding of sustainable management practices and the effects of anthropogenic disturbance.

One metaphor considers the Luquillo Mountains as a tapestry interwoven with elements of topography, water, geology, soil oxygen, and living organisms exposed continually to light, wind, rain, and to periodic violent combinations of these elements. Such exposure usually nourishes and maintains components of the tapestry, but occasionally reorganizes them through large and infrequent disturbances, keeping the mountain in a continuous state of flux. Each event defines a new pattern in the tapestry, and the cumulative effects of these events leave an imprint on the genotypes, abundances, and distributions of organisms that constitute the tapestry. The tapestry metaphor implies that at any moment visible patterns are the result of a complex history of damage and repair, either through processes of self-organization or management for conservation goals.

The tapestry that we see reveals only the surface details of the Luquillo Mountains, while hiding the underlying dynamics of the forest. A more apt metaphor is palimpsest, a manuscript page that has been written on more than once, with earlier messages only partially erased and still visible (Hubbell 1979). In ecological usage, a palimpsest is an area that reflects its history, highlighting the notion of changing organizational patterns that reflect the effects of contemporary, recent, or ancient disturbances. The geologic and topographic structure underlying the Luquillo Mountains results from a series of tectonic events that occurred eons ago and which continue at a very slow pace. The biotic composition of the Luquillo Mountains arises from a series of relatively recent (in geological time scales) immigration and extinction events, each of which has left an evolutionary as well as a paleontological record.

Repeated contemporary disturbance events such as hurricanes or human land use are preserved as changes in ecosystem characteristics that are visible through the examination of forest composition and structure, including soils. Each of these tectonic, biogeographic, or disturbance events is recorded in the biotic and abiotic structure of the Luquillo Mountains and taken together determine the palimpsest we see today.

Acknowledgments

This work was done in cooperation with UPR as part of the USDA Forest Service contribution to the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research Program in the Luquillo Experimental Forest. Work was conducted under grants BSR-8811902, DEB-9411973, DEB-9705814, DEB-0080538, and DEB-0218039 to the ITES of the UPR, and the IITF, USDA Forest Service.

*Ariel E. Lugo, Robert B. Waide, Michael R. Willig, Todd Crowl, Frederick N. Scatena, Jill Thompson, Whendee Silver , William H. McDowell, and Nicholas V. L. Brokaw