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CHILDREN'S TROPICAL FORESTS NEWS
Volume 3 June 1998
Editor: Roger Littlewood
CTF HITS TARGET TO SAVE JATUN SACHA ROAD CORRIDOR
A splendid response from our supporters in the
UK to the Appeal in our January Newsletter
and another large contribution from CTF
Groups in the United States has raised the
balance of $30,000 required to purchase the
forest corridor which will bridge the gap
between the Western and Eastern sectors of the
Jatun Sacha Biological Station.
The proposed construction of a road threatened
the destruction of a privately-owned,
kilometre-wide strip of primary forest between
the two sectors. Although the road, which will
link 12 isolated forest communities with the
outside world, will still be built, forest
clearance will now be limited to the width of
the road, which will not threaten the biological
integrity of the Reserve.
The Jatun Sacha Foundation has already
started to buy the forest corridor, which is
owned by five local farmers.
So a big thankyou to everybody who made our
Appeal such an instant success. Further news
in future Newsletters as the consolidation of
the Reserve progresses.
The Jatun Sacha Biological Station is a 5,000
acre primary rainforest reserve in Amazonian
Ecuador and has been the principal focus of
CTF UK's rainforest preservation efforts for
the last two years. Located where the foothills
of the Andes overlook the vastness of the
Amazon basin, it is one of the most
biologically diverse areas on Earth.
COSTA RICA
AMERICAN ACADEMIC SELLS HIS HOME TO HELP
LINK RAINFOREST RESERVES SUPPORTING 2.4% OF
THE WORLD'S BIODIVERSITY
Well, you've heard of giving till it hurts, but this
is something else!
In our last Newsletter, we reported the success of
a plan to rebuild a rainforest bridge across the
Continental Divide between two existing
rainforest reserves in Northern Costa Rica.
The completion of negotiations to buy a 533
hectare farm on the Divide closed the last gap
between Guanacasta National Park on the drier
Pacific slope and Rincon de la Vieja National
Park on the wet Atlantic slope.
The total cost of the vital building block to the
Area de Conservacion Guanacasta, which is
masterminding the whole project, is around
$530,000. A downpayment of $150,000 was
followed in January 1998 by a further $83,000,
with CTF UK making its first contribution to the
"Bridge" at this point.
Cue Bill Oddie
Just about now (15th June 1998) a further
$150,000 is due with a final payment of another
$150,000 on 15th January 1999. On April 20th,
$92,000 had been raised towards the June target
with $30,000 coming from Barnens Regnskog
(Children's Tropical Forests, Sweden). The other
$62,000 has come from an academic in the
Department of Biology at the University of
Pennsylvania who sold his house to raise the
m o n e y. This benefactor is a colleague of
Professor Dan Janzen, who is the driving force
behind the "Bridge" project!
CTF UK has now decided to make a contribution
of $1,000 towards this June target. Further help
from our supporters in the UK will obviously be
vital in meeting the final payment. Cue Bill
Oddie in our letter to supporters accompanying
this Newsletter.
Which is perhaps also the cue for some detailed
information on the biological value of the
Guanacasta Conservation Area as a whole - and
the significance of the "Bridge".
First, the total area of the complex of Reserves
comprising the GCA is 110,000 hectares
(272,000 acres), representing 2% of the total land
area of Costa Rica. It is situated in the North-Western
corner of the country.
The GCAencompasses three major forest types -tropical
dry forest; cloud forest; rainforest; and
the transitional zones between them. According
to Professor Janzen, these varied habitats are
home to about 300,000 species of organisms -estimated
at an astonishing 2.4% of all the
World's land-based biodiversity.
Extremely beautiful
The fully Costa Rican 87-member staff manage
this complex of Reserves, which is integrated
with the other 7 Costa Rican conservation areas
in the National Park Service.
The significance of the "Bridge", linking the drier
Pacific slope forests to the wet Atlantic slope
forests, is that, as climates warm up because of
the expected impact of global warming, it will
simply be too hot and dry for many creatures to
survive in the West. The "Bridge" will allow
them to migrate east into the 14,000 hectares of
upper-elevation cloud and rainforest in Rincon de
la Vieja National Park.
The actual "Bridge" land - at 400-600 metres
elevation - is a mosaic of beautiful original
rainforest, some damaged forest and dairy pasture
(which will now regrow its forest cover). This
vegetation type - rainforest at 400-600 metres - is
amongst the most diverse of all tropical land
habitats.
The area is also extremely beautiful, with full
views of Volcan Cacao and Volcan Rincon de la
Vieja. It is a sobering thought that you can save
quite a chunk of it by selling one house in the
United States. God Bless You, Sir!
ECUADOR
TORRENTIAL RAIN AIDS REFORESTATION
AS THE LOTTERY CONSIDERS OUR BILSA
COMMUNITIES SUPPORT BID
El Niño, it seems, means different weather
phenomena in different places. In North-Western
Ecuador, the location of the Jatun
Sacha Foundation's Bilsa Biological Station,
extreme rainfall amounts associated with the
offshore El Niño current have ensured very
high survival rates for 25,000 native tree
saplings recently planted both inside the Bilsa
Reserve and on nearby community farms.
And while this well-watered planting was
taking place - in November and December of
1997 - Robin Jolliffe and Vicky Porter of
Children's Tropical Forests UK were preparing
a £29,000 bid to the International Grants
Programme of the National Lottery Charities
Board to support the Jatun Sacha Foundation's
work with communities living on the edge of
the Bilsa Rainforest.
Local people reforesting
If the bid is successful, eight communities will
each have the lasting benefit of three skilled
forestry technicians, chosen from within the
communities themselves and trained at the
Bilsa Biological Station. These foresters will
promote and assist in the development of home
nurseries, agroforestry projects and micro-timber
plantations.
240 hectares (approx 600 acres) of degraded
farmland will be reforested by the Project
creating a productive and, in natural history
terms, a species-rich buffer zone to
complement the primary rainforest in the Bilsa
Biological Station.
5 hectares will be reforested on each farm; 2.5
hectares with a mix of fruit and nut tree
species; 2 hectares with mixed stands of rapid
and slower growing native timber species; and
0.5 hectares with a mix of suitable tropical
vegetables.
Family health benefits
This mix will ensure initial production of
nutritious vegetables within months and a
sustainable production of fruit, nut and timber
products during the medium and long term.
Family diets and health will benefit from the
addition of nutritious fruits and nuts.
Community members, especially women and
girls, will benefit from the production of these
saleable products and this will in turn help to
establish reforestation as a social norm in the
Bilsa area.
The success of pilot schemes established over
the last 3 years led to so many requests from
local people to reforest on their farms during
the months leading up to November 1997 that
the Jatun Sacha Foundation ran out of fruit
trees in the Bilsa nursery and in the community
and family nurseries as well.
The majority of the reforestation will take
place on degraded farmland not capable of
producing short cycle crops. And it is judged
that creating species-rich micro-timber stands
with native species will come near to providing
the quality of habitat for wildlife which exists
in the core primary forest in the Bilsa Reserve.
Meanwhile, these plantations will produce
their first saleable products within 8 to 10
years.
In the top three on Earth
And what of the Bilsa Biological Station itself?
In 1995, Norman Myers, the eminent American
ecologist, labelled Ecuador's Western coastal
forests as one of the top three conservation
priorities on Earth. Since then, the Jatun Sacha
Foundation, with help from around the world,
including sizeable donations from British
rainforest charities, has established the largest
private primary rainforest reserve in Western
Ecuador, now up to 3,000 hectares (7,400
acres) with further expansion due in the
coming months.
A final footnote. In the Summer 1997 issue of
CTF News we wrote a profile of the exotic and
vulnerable Long-Wattled Umbrellabird, which
is confined to the forests of Western Ecuador
and South-West Colombia. In a letter to CTF
UK from Dr Michael McColm of the Jatun
Sacha Foundation received in March of this
year, Dr McColm says that bird researchers at
Bilsa, in addition to adding new species to the
Reserve's list, have found that this supposedly
rare bird is one of Bilsa's more abundant
inhabitants.
WE ARE ON THE "NET"
Children's Tropical Forests UK is proud to
announce the launch of its new World Wide
Web Site. The site is intended to help promote
the various conservation projects sponsored by
C T F, as well as raising awareness of the
problems and threats facing the World's
rainforests.
The site is still in its infancy and will be
constantly evolving. But please come and visit
us at:
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ctf
and send us your feedback using the on-line
form you'll find there.
(The low technology, ink-stained wretch who
produces the CTF Newsletter fervently hopes
that all the dots and dashes are in the right
place).
As you might guess, CTF's newest and
youngest Trustee, Sean Newell, has been
responsible for achieving, in a very short time,
something that the more "mature" Trustees
have been talking round for some time.
FREE ENTRY FOR CTF SUPPORTERS' CHILDREN TO BERKSHIRE'S WYLD COURT RAINFOREST
One of our fellow UK rainforest charities, the
World Land Trust was the recent beneficiary of
a British rainforest - all under glass in the
depths of the Berkshire countryside but with
the lush, humid look and feel of the real thing.
At the invitation of John Burton of WLT, two
trustees of CTF UK visited the tropical
splendours of Wyld Court earlier this year.
The visit resulted in an offer from the World
Land Trust for CTF UK to display information
about its rainforest project work at Wyld Court
- and an invitation to CTF supporters.
Wyld Court is particularly renowned for its lily
pool, where you can see the Giant Water Lily
(Victoria amazonica) found, in the wild, only
in the Amazon basin. The lilies at Wyld Court
are at their best from mid-June to mid
November.
THANK YOU
We are grateful to Rebecca and Jessica for
their donation to CTF UK in memory of their
dearly beloved brother Matthew.
Angela Yule, a student from Dorking in
Surrey, sent us some photographs of a special
exhibition project in which she promoted CTF
using information provided by us. She also
donated £25 to the Jatun Sacha Appeal.
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