Those with no money whatsoever were given an allowance and low interest loans subsidized by SOPRO, and housing that the society had leased provided the refugees with much needed shelter. Society funds also paid for the establishment of a twenty-bed hospital and a small home and kindergarten for the children in the capital city. To the southeast of the capital, in the city of Cochabamba, elevation 8,500 feet, SORPRO established a home for the elderly and a sanatorium for those seeking relief from the extreme altitude of the capital.Agricultural training centers were set up to teach refugees the rudiments of farming in a semitropical and tropical environment. Many had no notion of what it meant to work the land; their ranks were filled with professionals such as chemists, engineers, lawyers and physicians. Indeed, in a letter to Hochschild, the Joint’s Paul Baerwald emphasized the importance of success, yet Baerwald also had his deep-seated doubts. “Jewish farm settlement is a much more difficult problem than settlement of peasants.” The Jewish refugee needed both acclimatization and ‘psycho-physiological retraining and readjustment’ Baerwald emphasized. Indeed, besides acclimatizing, one also had to acculturate to a largely indigenous populace, people whose customs and food were exotic in the extreme.There existed elements of the Bolivian population who viewed the newcomers as trespassers who took work from the native, that the displaced refugee was creating the displaced native. Yet there were those who also proffered the hand of friendship in the dynamic relationship between foreigner and native. However, cordial relationships between the refugee and the native could not make up for the shortcomings of the settlement plan. The scholar León E. Bieber lists the factors that led to the abandonment of Buena Tierra,plant benches and notes that a combination of reasons was responsible for its ultimate failure. Among them were the “negligencia en la selección de los inmigrantes.” Many ofthe refugees were professionals, and during the interview process had lied about their backgrounds and level of experience as farmers.
The pressure to escape the Nazis and save one’s life was just too much; hence there were physicians, engineers and other professionals who had falsely claimed an agricultural background. Other key reasons that Bieber noted were the “factores topográficos, la calidad de las tierras, la precaria estructura vial boliviana y la falta de adecuado apoyo.” The sheer isolation of Buena Tierra and the Yungas was due to a paucity of roads and railroad lines into the region. Had this transportation network infrastructure been in place, Buena Tierra may have prospered.The quality of the land and soil at Buena Tierra was hyped by the agronomist Bonoli, who, it turned out, “was profoundly mistaken.”Bieber cited the lack of sufficient government help as another factor that contributed to Buena Tierra’s demise. To achieve success it was essential to have, besides aid from Jewish philanthropies, the full support of the Bolivian Government. Finally, most of the refugees viewed Buena Tierra, and the host country Bolivia, as a stepping stone to other, more enticing locales such as the United States or Argentina, two American countries with thriving Jewish communities. We can debate the failure of the ‘experiments’ at Sosúa and Buena Tierra, yet there was for sure relative success. Both colonies were founded as places of refuge for thousands of involuntary emigrants fleeing the violence of their homeland. The fact that some refugees were able to escape the Nazi death-grip and begin life anew as farmers in distant lands underscores that very success. In retrospect, both projects had achieved their original goal of saving lives, and have left a model from which one may draw conclusions regarding their failure or a success. The model of agricultural settlement that Rosen successfully used for the Ukraine and Crimea, proved to be difficult to transfer to Bolivia and the Dominican Republic. In spite of Rosen’s agronomist background, Rosenberg’s well-placed connections and professional experience as a lawyer, Hochschild’s wealth, and the help of the military man and Bolivian president Germán Busch, the success of these Jewish agricultural colonies was never assured. It all came down to the individual efforts of a few hardy souls and the collective will of many others behind the scenes. Although the same development model was used among the settlements discussed herein, it is clear that what had worked at one site failed miserably at others.
Competent administration, experimentation with different crops, a willing and able work force, along with the use of cutting-edge technology did not, by any stretch of the imagination, guarantee success. A fascist megalomaniac, a couple of third world dictators, a beloved U.S. President, a Jewish mining magnate and a cast of others, made for some very strange bedfellows indeed. Remove one of these historic figures from the equation, and neither Sosúa nor Buena Tierra would have seen the light of day.As human-converted habitats expand over Earth’s surface, the fate of global biodiversity will depend increasingly on the quality and characteristics of farming landscapes . Agricultural systems vary widely in their ability to support biodiversity, with many species extirpated from some but sustained in others . Additionally, characteristics of the species themselves, evolved over millions of years, may predispose some lineages to benefit from human environmental impacts . Phylogenetic diversity, the total evolutionary history or phylogenetic branch lengths of all species in a community , is recognized as having intrinsic conservation value . Also, ecological experiments in small plots indicate that communities with more phylogenetic diversity are more stable , possess higher productivity , and support more species at other trophic levels . Despite the known impact of agriculture on species loss, how habitat conversion affects phylogenetic diversity remains unknown. Studies of plants and invertebrates have established that local environmental disturbances favor subsets of closely related clades and often result in phylogenetic diversity loss . Further, some studies that examine the global extinction risk of birds and mammals suggest that particular branches of the tree of life are at greater risk than others , although whether evolutionarily distinct species are more at risk than species with many living relatives remains contested . We quantified changes in phylogenetic diversity across multiple landscapes in Costa Rica, combining a recent complete avian phylogeny with temporally and spatially extensive tropical bird censuses to assess how habitat conversion is restructuring the avian phylogeny . The data set comprised 44 transects, surveyed in wet and dry seasons over 12 years across four regions in two biomes .
Transects were located in three land-use types: forest reserves, diversified agricultural systems, and intensive mono cultures. Compared with intensive mono cultures, diversified agricultural systems had more crop types, complex configurations of vegetation, and substantial surrounding tree cover . Our analysis focused on three unresolved questions. First, do certain bird clades thrive in agriculture, or is this capacity broadly distributed across the tree of life? Second, how much phylogenetic diversity is lost when native forest is replaced with agriculture? Last, are evolutionarily distinct species capable of persisting in agriculture? We found that clades from across the bird phylogeny thrived in agriculture . Affinity for different habitats showed phylogenetic signal, meaning that closely related species were more likely to share habitat preferences than species that were distantly related . The phylogenetic signal was best described by using Pagel’s lambda transformation of the phylogeny , which reduces the degree of correlation of traits between species below the Brownian motion expectation . Although most taxonomic families had species associated with all habitat types, some families tended to affiliate with particular habitats. For example, pigeons, seedeaters, swallows, and blackbirds were agriculture-affiliated,rolling bench whereas trogons, antbirds, ovenbirds, and manakins were forest-affiliated . Despite the variety of lineages that were found in agriculture, average within transect phylogenetic diversity was 40% lower in intensive mono cultures than in forest reserves and 15% lower in diversified agricultural systems than in forest reserves . Across all transects and years, forest reserves, diversified agricultural systems, and intensive mono cultures housed 4.10, 3.85, and 3.26 billion years of evolutionary history. Two processes were responsible for changes in phylogenetic diversity: species loss and increasing species relatedness. We found roughly the same number of bird species in diversified agricultural systems as in forest reserves [N = 62 species; likelihood ratio test P = 0.75] but half as many species in intensive mono cultures . However, species loss alone did not account for declining phylogenetic diversity in agriculture . Species in forest reserves were less related to one another than expected by chance, whereas species in diversified agricultural systems and intensive mono cultures were more closely related . These patterns indicate that phylogenetic diversity loss in agriculture occurs in two steps. First,habitat conversion from forest to diversified agricultural systems causes a shift in community composition while maintaining species richness: Agricultural species are not nested subsets of forest species . Because species in diversified agricultural communities are closely related, this shift results in a moderate decline in phylogenetic diversity within a transect. Then, as agricultural practices intensify, species loss from this agricultural bird community causes another more-substantial decline in phylogenetic diversity. Whether phylogenetic diversity loss will substantially reshape the global tree of life depends on the capability of species from evolutionarily distinct lineages to persist in agricultural lands. We quantified each species’ evolutionary distinctness as its contribution to the phylogenetic diversity of the world’s 9993 bird species . Species in forest reserves had slightly greater average evolutionary distinctness than those in diversified agricultural systems or intensive mono cultures . This pattern did not result from a small number of highly distinct, forest affiliated species—repeating the analysis after removing the top 10% most distinct species did not alter results .
Conversely, communities in intensive mono cultures hosted younger species with more-rapid diversification rates . At the species level after accounting for phylogenetic covariance, DR was negatively correlated with forest affiliation and positively correlated with affinity for diversified agricultural systems . To explore how habitat conversion affects the temporal population dynamics and local extirpation risks of evolutionarily distinct species, we developed a temporal, multi-species, hierarchical occupancy model that accounted for detection bias . The model provided a dynamic assessment of which species were extirpated from and/or recolonized sites at the greatest rates from year to year . Extirpation was estimated as the probability that a species did not persist from one year to the next, whereas colonization was the probability that a species was absent one year but present the next. We modeled occupancy dynamics over 12 years, validating our model through examining dry and wet season surveys separately. We found that extirpation probability was highest in intensive mono cultures and lowest in forest reserves . More evolutionarily distinct species experienced higher extirpation rates than less-distinct species in both diversified agricultural systems and intensive mono cultures. Evolutionarily distinct species fared worst in intensive mono cultures, where the top 10% most distinct species experienced extirpation rates ~two times greater than in diversified agricultural systems. Between-year colonization probabilities were low in all land-use types, but evolutionarily distinct species colonized both diversified agricultural systems and intensive mono cultures less frequently than less-distinct species . Repeating analyses at the genus level confirmed that the results were not driven by a few clades. These findings suggest that, over time, evolutionarily distinct species will face challenges in maintaining populations in agricultural systems, especially in intensive mono cultures. We offer two possible explanations for why evolutionarily distinct species and phylogenetic diversity should decline in agriculture. First, species that today inhabit tropical agriculture may have evolved primarily in open habitats, such as grasslands. During geologically recent periods of glaciation when open grassland habitats in the Neotropics proliferated , several clades may have undergone increased speciation , leading to the enrichment of younger species in agriculture . Indeed, we found that species that use natural open habitats were more likely to thrive in agriculture . However, whereas species associated with savannas had slightly higher diversification rates than other species , there were no consistent differences in diversification rates between species that use natural open habitats and those that do not . Another explanation is that birds in agriculture represent a novel community.