Plants were a constant for Alejandra Perez-Enriquez growing up in Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, a rural area 60 miles northeast of the capital city of San José with a landscape defined by rivers and rainforests. “Our house and backyard were always full of plants,” she says. “My mom and grandma kept medicinal plants. They know the forest. That got me interested in tropical ecology.”
Now a graduate student advised by Plant and Microbial Biology Professor Jennifer Powers, Perez-Enriquez studies how plants interact with the environment. She makes regular trips back to Costa Rica for field research and to work on ecological restoration projects in conjunction with an organization she started with a fellow student while still an undergraduate.
Perez-Enriquez and her colleagues employ a technique called participatory mapping to understand a particular environment and the community’s relationship to it. She describes drawings as a common language that can transcend linguistic and cultural barriers. Members of the community draw features of the landscape as it is, as it was and as they wish it to be. They share information about the connections between plants, animals and people. This, in turn, helps inform the recommendations Perez-Enriquez and her colleagues make about a specific place, bringing together the scientific and the social to develop detailed ecological restoration plans.
Perez-Enriquez notes making room for people to explore the power they have to shape their future is a much-needed corrective to a past marked by colonialism and the disenfranchisement of the local people. “We haven't ever been part of the decisions made about the land,” she says. “When we do ecological restoration in this way, we have the power to decide how the land is going to be.”
