Approches analytiques d'évaluation de la diversité et de la valeur en ...

Introduction
Monitoring our forests of the Congo Basin often comes at the price of hard fieldwork; a
cadre of dedicated botanists and technicians from across the CARPE landscapes make
this work possible and successful. Educational levels vary from technicians who have
never graduated from high school but know a thousand plants upon sight, to professors
and scientists who know the region’s endemic flora through years of work in the field and
herbarium. This combination of levels recently met in Lopé, Gabon to train a new
generation of technicians while reinforcing skills and technical capacities of the botanists
who would be making future conservation decisions on the region’s flora.
Workshops like these are believed to be critical for the success of regional activities that
focus on a vast rainforest spanning most of Central Africa. Considering that
1. the same flora is found through out the countries covered by this forest, howbeit
in different densities and differing patterns of distribution, and
2. these countries are adopting an increasingly regional approach to management of
the Congo Basin forests as attested to by COMIFAC, the Congo Basin Forest
Partnership, as well as joint patrols of Parks and reserves along borders of several
countries (e.g. Nouabalé-Ndoki NP in Congo, Lobéké in Cameroon and Dzanga
Sangha in CAR), etc.
There is need to harmonise management strategies and as such to deal with training on a
regional level. One important result that is thus achieved is that essential contacts are
made during these workshops that allow south-south and north-south collaboration and
communication among countries and institutions.
The approach of using regional expertise to train CARPE technicians is a useful one. It
reinforces the impact that Africans can have on their conservation decisions by showing
students that training can come from the south and it strengthens regional ties among
institutions and NGO’s planning the workshop by directly involving Africans in the
training, reporting, and planning process.
These workshops are a valuable way to do training. Having garnered much support from
landscape partners, NGO’s, and governmental institutions these past two years, it is
anticipated that the group of technicians being trained will fulfil a variety of roles in
future conservation work.
Funding and Roles of Organizers
Funding for this workshop was secured through CARPE with additional on-site support
from the Wildlife Conservation Society-Gabon. This workshop helps meet CARPE’s
goals of capacity building in the Congo Basin (Intermediate Result 2); local expertise was
utilized to the fullest extent possible, primarily by working with REBAC.
Funding was administrated through SI and MBG. The Herbier National du Gabon and
MBG coordinated logistics in Gabon. SI in Cameroon organized coordination of the
Cameroonian instructors and participants. REBAC organized the content of the
workshop and identified instructors from the region.
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