Golfo de Nicoya

The Golfo de Nicoya is located along the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and is considered the most important area for shorebirds in the country. The gulf is 90 kilometers (km) long and 60,938 hectares, including about 150 km of coastline of which 112 km is covered with mangroves, estimated at nearly 20,000 hectares in 2018. In addition to these large stands of mangroves, the gulf exposes the largest tidal mudlfats of Costa Rica during low tide.

Regular shorebird surveys carried out by the Union of Ornithologists of Costa Rica (UOCR) ever since 2007, including monitoring programs like the Central American Waterbird Census (CAWC) and the Migratory Shorebird Project (MSP), resulted in an increased understanding of the importance of the area for shorebirds and included significant counts for several species. In fact, all 44 species shorebirds recorded in Costa Rica have been observed in the area.

The Golfo de Nicoya is a WHSRN site of Regional Importance for the precence of more than 1% of the biogeographic populations of the Wilson’s Plover (Charadrius wilsonia), Collared Plover (Charadrius collaris), Short-billed Dowitcher (Limnodromus griseus) and Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus). It is unclear how many birds exactly pass through during migration (i.e. taking into account turnover), but with day counts of more then a 1,000 of several shorebird species, including species like Western Sandpiper (Calidris mauri) and Semipalmated Sandpiper (Calidris pusilla), it is likely that over 20,000 shorebirds use the area during migration seasons.

The Golfo de Nicoya WHSRN site is under the jurisdiction of the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC – Sistema Nacional de Áreas de Conservación), an agency of the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE – Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía) for the Costa Rican government. Portions of the proposed area are protected by law including two protected wildlife areas (La Ensenada and Estero Puntarenas y Manglares).

Local communities are primarly fishermen with limited resources. Regional habitat management plans recognize the needs of local communities and focus on sustainability in order to ensure local livilhoods are balanced with habitat needs. Some comunities inside the gulf (e.g., Chomes, Costa de Pájaros and Colorado) have communal organizations that also focus on sustainable management of aquatic and mangrove resources. However, these communities have limited job opportunities outside of a fishing-related industry.

Main threats for the gulf include water pollution from human settlements and agriculture. This includes the growth of cities and towns in the surrounding areas of the gulf like Puntarenas, Tárcoles, Colorado, Chomes, or Jicaral. Especifically the lack of sewage management in the Tárcoles and Tempisque watersheds is contaminating long stretches of the gulf’s coastline. The expanding agriculture also increases water polution from runoff and increases sedimentation in the gulf due to changes in the use of water in the area. Other threats include human disturbance from fishing and recreation, disturbance from stray dogs, destruction of marine ecosystems, and reduction of food resources by trawling and overfishing. Coastal development causing increased removal of mangroves also affect the natural cycles within the gulf and threaten the habitat of the Costa Rican endemic Mangrove Hummingbird (Amazilia boucardi).

Several management plans are available for the area, but these are specific to particular land management categories. The main focus of these management plans is halting the decrease and detoriation of mangroves and asociated ecosystems in the gulf. However, these plans were developed with little to no collaboration between areas of different management categories and do not have a landscape vision for the entire Gulf of Nicoya. To resolve this issue, a comprehensive and regional management plan focusing on the whole Gulf of Nicoya was published in 2019 as the “Regional strategy for the management and conservation of mangroves in the Gulf of Nicoya – 2019-2030”.  Although this regional strategy has a main focus on the conservation of the mangrove ecosystem, associated habitats like intertidal flats will benefit from the developed strategies.