PRORENA reforestation research

At the July 12-13 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) annual science symposium various scientists affiliated with the renowned institution reported on the work that they are doing to an audience mainly composed of fellow scientists but including quite a few lay people as well. The final presentation was by Mark Wishnie of the Native Species Reforestation Project (PRORENA), an ambitious multidisciplinary effort that involves a number of US and Panamanian governmental and non-governmental organizations but is principally led by STRI’s Center for Tropical Forest Science and Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Wishie’s talk was entitled “What to do after the forest has been lost,” and covered both the ways in which PRORENA is asking the question and some of the preliminary answers the project is finding.

In the debates leading to the tax reform laws of 2003 and 2005, Panama’s decade-long experience with reforestation incentives was discussed and ultimately the tax break component of the reforestation laws was repealed. The problem was not only a matter of outright corruption, as in tax breaks being improperly given to hustlers ranging from foreign scam artists who cut down cacao plantations in Bocas del Toro to replace them with teak and noni or to Panamanian crooks who cut down natural forests to replant with teak. A big part of the problem was teak itself, and that species has accounted for three-quarters or more of all the reforestation that has been done in this country.

“When we replace these incredibly diverse ecosystems with a single species, we lose lots of the services that forests provide,” Wishnie explained. Moreover, he claimed, “80 percent of the teak will never be profitable,” mainly because it was planted in places without the proper soil or climatic conditions to turn the fast-growing import from South Asia into high-quality timber.

There is another big problem with teak to which birdwatchers and others who spend a lot of time in the Panamanian outdoors can attest. Monoculture teak forests tend to be very quiet places because our native fauna don’t eat the seeds or leaves and our birds don’t nest in it. Thus in the isthmian setting a natural forest’s wildlife habitat function is not fulfilled by a stand of teak.

The latter problem is not unique to teak, of course. Monocultures of native species will in many cases present the same limitations as stands of exotics. “Just because something’s native doesn’t mean that it has greater conservation value,” Wishnie noted.

Nevertheless, trees that are indigenous to Panama have already in a certain sense shown that they “work” here, that they have historically adapted to our environment and played their parts in complex local ecosystems.

So PRORENA, which works primarily with private landowners both big and small who are or may be amenable to planting trees on their land, has started out looking for answers to three big questions:

So why should people reforest with native trees? “We need about a million different answers if there is to be hope of success,” Wishnie maintained. “In most cases,” he pointed out, bringing back an entire natural forest system will not be viable.”

But he did say that nevertheless in many deforested areas tree cover can be incorporated into land use, and that has a series of benefits in its own right. However, one common belief that has guided national policy, that planting more tree increases the quantity of water, is probably not true in many cases. It seems that in many cases reforestation means more water in the streams during dry season, but in a lot of other cases the trees consume more water than they conserve or breathe out. “We don’t understand the mechanisms well enough to predict” the relationship between reforestation and water quantity, Wishnie explained.

Still, forest cover can provide a rural economy with timber and other valuable forest products, firewood, cooling shade and wildlife habitat. Noting that in the United States timber investments have outperformed the stock market since 1959, Wishnie cautioned that there are nevertheless many financial, cultural, biological, physical and ignorance factors that work against reforestation.

PRORENA is attacking the ignorance problem first, with a three-pronged research project that looks at biophysical, socio-economic and business and public policy factors.

The project is conducting trials of 63 different tree species, at an outdoor laboratory in Gamboa and now at a similar nursery in Rio Hato and soon in other places. Moreover, PRORENA does “opportunistic research” in cooperation with the Peace Corps by talking with and collecting data from 27 farmers in Los Santos who have already planted trees on their land. One of the tree species that’s being studied is teak, which despite the problems that have been encountered with it makes a good point of reference.

In the Gamboa and Rio Hato plantings, tree species are being tested according to such factors as their uses, their natural ranges and their tolerance for shade. The trees are planted in small blocks of several trees of one species and regularly measured.

PRORENA has a crew going around the country collecting seeds for these experiments. In the course of those explorations, new things are being learned about the ranges of various species. Around Achiote, in the western part of Colon province, a number of trees that had never been reported there have been identified. In Los Santos, a tree never before reported in Panama was encountered.

Data is very preliminary --- for the most part only for the first year’s growth. So far, Wishnie said, “cocobolo is a champ. So is mahogany, but it has an insect pest problem.”

In the first year, and with certain exceptions, trees have a lower growth rate at Rio Hato than has been observed at Gamboa. That would be intuitive to figure, given that the former locale gets substantially less rain than the latter. But it seems that new trees also grow faster in Los Santos than at the Rio Hato experimental plantings, and that differential wouldn’t be readily explained by differences in annual rainfall.

The socio-economic part of PRORENA’s research gets not only into monetary problems like financing for tree crops that in many cases won’t be ready for harvest during the planter’s lifetime, but also into non-monetary economic factors that are important to the living standards of small farmers. The plan is to spin off a lot of this research into a non-governmental organization engaged in the reforestation consultant business.

PRORENA is also looking at the experiences with reforestation tax breaks, not only in Panama but in neighboring countries. So far, Wishnie said, the look has been just cursory, and there “is very little information to inform the debate” on government incentives for reforestation.

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