On Frank Golley’s International and Interdisciplinary Insights for a Twenty-First Century Earth Stewardship Based on Environmental Ethics - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 430

Box 29.3. San Carlos de Rio, Venezuela
The San Carlos Project started in 1974 as a 10-year collaboration among
Frank Golley, Carl Jordan, Hans Klinge from Germany, and Ernesto Medina
from Venezuela (Golley et al. 1971 ; Jordan 2001 ). They and their graduate
students, such as Chris Uhl and Florencia Montagnini, were among some of
the fi rst to study nutrient cycling in the Amazon (Uhl and Jordan 1984 ).
These former students are working today with their students on document-
ing ecosystem services in the tropics (Montagnini et al. 2013 ) to advance
sustainability and an ethical and ecological consciousness (Uhl et al. 1990 ;
Uhl 2003 ).
A major contribution of the project was documentation that rapid nutrient
cycling occurred rapidly in this lowland rainforest. This discovery was a
major explanation for the luxurious green forest that impressed early travel-
ers to the Amazon. The use of isotopic tracers documented that nutrients
were held in the living forest biomass, and then released to temporary storage
in the soils and back to living roots once the dead organic matter was rapidly
broken down by fungi and bacteria. The rapid cycling was due to the symbio-
sis of tree roots with mycorrhizal fungi that increased nutrient uptake by
roots. The concentrations of nutrients were extremely limited, and different
from the higher nutrient concentrations observed in some other tropical
regions where soils were relatively deep and geologically young. The weath-
ered soils of the lowland Amazon were only productive when those species
of plants and their associated biota were present because they had evolved to
use the nutrients effi ciently (Jordan 1987 ). Large-scale clearing of the forest
for agricultural crops could more often create pastures. Therefore, the rate of
regrowth of the rain forest did follow the resilient pathways that character-
ized smaller patches of disturbances such as wind damage or localized fi res.
Indigenous farmers recognized that the soil nutrients were depleted within
a few years after patches of the rainforest were cut and burned for small agri-
cultural plots. To continue to grow their crops, they moved to other areas of
older forests that had accumulated nutrients over time, and rotated their farm-
ing. Until populations grew large, this rotation apparently allowed suffi cient
time for the forest to recover in many regions. In some areas of the tropics, the
selective cutting of trees left certain species in place if they were to be used
for house construction or food. This “fi ltering” or traditional “management”
practices in selecting certain forest species left a legacy of useful plants in the
modern ecosystem (Gómez-Pompa et al. 1974 ). This example of an interna-
tional team effort provided insights about differences in nutrient cycling on
ecosystem productivity. Current interest is focused on how more prolonged
droughts may increase the extent and frequency of fi res that will further alter
primary production that affects the carbon balance of the rainforests and the
atmosphere (Gatti et al. 2014 ).