Costa Rica is recognized worldwide for its nature conservation policy following the traditional land-sparing approach. However, concerns have been raised about the opposite trends of the agricultural land cover changes driven by the option to expand old and new export crops after the country’s external debt crisis of the 1980s. We study what happened during the last 20 years by applying landscape ecology metrics to the REDD+ land cover maps of 1986, 2001, and 2014, and statistically testing these indicators with the locations of species richness of plants and birds recorded by INBio. Our results confirm that deforestation has been reversed and most of the biodiversity considered is housed in forestland, but also that the expansion of export monocultures and urban sprawl have fragmented and isolated these tropical forests. Ecological connectivity values decreased 13% across the territory, all crops are negatively correlated with bird and plant locations, and the metropolitan expansion caused a detrimental impact on coffee agroforestry. All these outcomes are consistent with the growing deficit of the Costa Rican physical trade balance due to a faster increase of tropical exports than the growing imports of staple food, with a loss of soil organic matter filled by high doses of agrochemicals imported. Overcoming these environmental problems require a new land-sharing approach to nature conservation aimed at improving ecological connectivity through an agroecology approach combined with land-use planning to preserve the remaining green belt of the shade coffee plantations as a buffer green infrastructure in the metropolitan area.

哥斯达黎加采用传统的土地节约方法，因其自然保护政策而享誉全球。然而，人们对1980年代该国外债危机后扩大新旧出口作物的选择权所驱动的农业用地覆盖变化的相反趋势提出了关切。我们通过将景观生态学指标应用于1986、2001和2014年的REDD +土地覆盖图，并通过INBio记录的动植物物种丰富度的位置对这些指标进行统计测试，来研究过去20年中发生的情况。我们的结果证实，森林砍伐得到了逆转，大多数生物多样性被认为是栖息在林地中，而且出口单一文化的扩张和城市蔓延使这些热带森林零散而孤立。整个地区的生态连通性值下降了13％，所有农作物与鸟类和植物的位置均呈负相关，大都市的扩张对咖啡农林业产生了不利影响。所有这些结果都与哥斯达黎加实际贸易差额的增加相吻合，这是由于热带出口增长快于主食进口，而热带有机出口增长快于主食进口，而土壤有机质的损失却被大量进口的农药所填充。要克服这些环境问题，就需要一种新的土地共享自然保护方法，该方法旨在通过农业生态学方法与土地利用规划相结合来改善生态连通性，以保护阴影咖啡种植园的剩余绿化带，作为大都市区的缓冲绿色基础设施。