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General introduction
areas of easy accessibility. Furthermore the output was often rather descriptive and
aiming at the provision of rapid baseline information necessary for a sustainable
management of the Campo Faunal Reserve. Therefore, the present study is the first
systematic attempt to assess the botanical diversity of the Campo-Ma’an area in
order to identify, locate and map hotspots for biodiversity conservation.
1.4. BOTANICAL AND ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT METHODS
In a large, heterogeneous and structurally complex forest ecosystem such as the
Campo-Ma’an tropical rain forest, conservation cannot proceed without a thorough
understanding of the components of the ecosystems that are to be preserved. We
need to know what are the species of high conservation priorities and where are they
located, so that we can target conservation resources to these locations. Therefore,
an inventory or biological stocktaking is requisite for all conservation initiatives.
However, the selection of the most appropriate methods for the rapid assessment of
forest ecosystems is always a difficult matter, and a series of questions need to be
addressed to decide on the best approach to be taken. Some of these questions are:
• What are the specific objectives, priorities and concerns?
• What information is available, essential and useful?
• How can the information needed be provided?
• How can it be recorded, analysed, reported and used?
• What limitations and problems can be perceived?
Furthermore, the traditional approaches of forest inventory are not sufficient for
biodiversity assessment, because they are mainly limited to tree species (especially
timber-sized trees), which are assumed to reflect the forest floristic composition and
physical structure. More often, taxonomic attention is weak for other growth forms
such as shrubs, small trees, herbs and epiphytes, and despite a widely accepted
recommendation that herbarium specimens should be routinely collected, this is
done very rarely, if at all. Therefore, to be effective, a botanical assessment method
that provides both quantitative and qualitative information was used during our
study.
Sampling criteria and field methods
After a literature review of existing botanical work done in the area, a study of aerial
photographs, satellite images, topographic and vegetation maps, a preliminary
reconnaissance trip was carried out in the study area to identify representative and
homogeneous vegetation types for sampling. These representative vegetation types
were selected subjectively on the basis of physical and human factors such as
climate (especially rainfall), altitude, slope, soils, the proximity to the sea and degree
of forest use. Two types of samples were used during the assessment, the measured
samples and the qualitative samples. The measured samples provided quantitative
information on stand structure and composition of the forest, while qualitative
information on species richness, life form and guild was provided by the qualitative
samples.
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