Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity

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Keynote Addresses Recent research and development work being carried out by CATIE and its national partners in natural Central American timber production forests has the goals of increasing knowledge of forest management effects on biodiversity – with emphasis on the surprisingly poorly-documented area of species- and geneticlevel diversity of tree communities and populations – and on the development of adaptive ecological components of national standards for sustainable forest management at the fmu level. This work, possibly uniquely in the tropics, takes into account that Central American production forests are also, increasingly, fragmented forests. Work towards the twin goals is closely integrated. The focus is on two moist forest ecoregions as defined by Dinerstein et al. (1995): the Central American Atlantic forest and the Tehuantepec forest. Besides embracing some of the largest remnant forest areas of Central America, these ecoregions are major sources of forest products and are a key component of the area of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, a major conservation strategy currently being implemented with support from governments and international organizations. We emphasize that this research focuses on managed forests, not on forests subjected to conventional logging. Taxonomic biodiversity at the species level is usefully characterized in terms of both the species diversity and the species composition of the forest community and our work is carried out in permanent sample plots with planning for the long term. As a large proportion of the plant diversity of tropical rain forests is found among life forms other than large trees, this characterization should embrace a broader spectrum of the community than is the case in traditional permanent sample plot studies. CATIE has introduced methodological innovations to take this latter necessity into account, sampling the forest understorey as well as individuals ≥ 10 cm dbh. For the analysis of management effects on plant taxonomic biodiversity, our results show that in general, it is convenient to identify both direct and indirect effects. Direct effects are immediate consequences of management operations and occur simply because some plants in sample plots are killed by those operations. Indirect effects of management operations on plant biodiversity may occur as consequences of managementinduced changes in forest environmental conditions or in ecological processes such as pollination or seed dispersal. These effects will evolve over time and may be long-lasting. Direct effects of management on plant species richness are relatively simple to demonstrate. Speciesabundance distributions in our permanent sample plots are typical of those for tropical forests in that they show large numbers of species represented by few or single individuals. Some of these individuals are killed when forests are logged or silvicultural treatments applied, these deaths bringing about immediate reductions in the species-richness and diversity of the vegetation in the plot. It is important to point out that such reductions of diversity are to an extent artefacts of the permanent sample plot techniques used and by their very nature, certainly do not mean that species are being locally extinguished. Indirect effects require demonstration by more detailed studies, though it may be inferred that such changes are taking place especially if appropriate methodologies for the study of mortality are used. In intensive research in three different floristic types of production forest in the Central American Atlantic moist forest CATIE has found, however, that in spite of the array of factors which may influence it in timber production forests, plant species diversity is not reduced during the first decade of management. This conclusion applies over a range of harvesting intensities from 10 – 30 m 3 ha -1 and to forest stands where silvicultural treatment has produced major changes in forest structure and marked increases in the growth of potential crop trees. Two hundredyear simulations using Gavilán, an individual-tree computer model developed at CATIE (Sitoe 2000), further support the tentative conclusion that plant species diversity is a robust forest characteristic in the context of management interventions typical of Central American production forests, and that sustainable production and the conservation of a large proportion of the original plant taxonomic biodiversity are compatible. Forest composition and forest diversity may vary independently (Finegan 1996) and it remains a possibility that compositional change occurs, for example if populations of plant species typical of the original forest decline or are locally extinguished under management, even if forest diversity is maintained. Speciesabundance distributions again rear their heads in the analysis of compositional change using permanent sample plot data, as changes in relative abundance can only be reliably identified for that minority of species which are, or become, relatively common. Our results for such species show that as may be expected, forest 13
Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity composition is changed directly by management as the sizes and structures of populations of commercial species, or non-commercial species which compete with potential crop trees in silviculturally treated forests, are modified by intervention (Finegan et al. in press). Marked increases in the abundances of light-demanding species occur only patchily in the forests. The apparent robustness of plant diversity in the managed forests studied suggests that the taxonomyintensive monitoring of this parameter is not of high priority in sustainability assessments using Criteria and Indicators (C&I) (Finegan et al. in press). With respect to that majority of species that occur at low densities, and those species whose populations are “targeted” by management, such as those of commercial value, CATIE is now pursuing the suggestion by Finegan et al. (in press) that a focal species approach (Noss 1999) can be usefully adapted for research and monitoring of management effects. These latter suggestions are being fed into proposals for adaptive C & I sets for the assessment of ecological sustainability (McGinley and Finegan in press), where it is considered that the openness of regional expert groups to the concept of adaptive management (McGinley and Finegan in press) must be matched by objective input from research organisations such as CATIE regarding the what, how and why of biological monitoring for forest management (Finegan et al. in press). References Ammour, T.; Ocampo, R.; Robles,G. 1994. Caracterización de los sectores asociados a la producción, comercialización y transformación de plantas medicinales en Costa Rica. Turrialba, Costa Rica, CATIE/Proyecto Olafo. Documento de trabajo N 3. 36 p. Comisión Nacional de Certificación Forestal. 1999. Estándares y procedimientos para el manejo sostenible y la certificación forestal en Costa Rica. CNCF. San José, Costa Rica. 54 pp. Dinerstein, E., Olson, D.M., Graham, D.J., Webster, A.L., Primm, S.A., Bookbinder, M.P. and Ledec, G. (1995) A Conservation Assessment of the Terrestrial Ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 129pp. Dominguez, D.; Gomez, A. 1990. La economía extractiva en la Amazonía Colombiana 1850-1930. TROPENBOS - Corporación colombiana para la Amazonía Araracuara. 279 p. FAO. 1996. Forest resource assessment 1990. FAO Forestry Paper 130. Roma. 152 p. FAO. 1997; State of the World’s Forests 1997, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy, 200 p. FAO. 2000. Global forest resources assessment. FAO Forestry paper 140. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy, 357 p. Finegan, B. (1996). Pattern and process in neotropical secondary rain forests: the first hundred years of succession. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 11, 119-124. Finegan, B., Delgado, D., Camacho, M. and Zamora, N. In press. Timber production and plant biodiversity conservation in a Costa Rican rain forest: an experimental study and its lessons for adaptive sustainability assessment. In A. Franc (Editor), Proceedings of the Conference/Workshop on Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management at the Forest Management Unit Level. Nancy, France, March 21-24 2000. European Forestry Institute. Gálvez, J. 1996. Elementos técnicos para el manejo forestal diversificado de bosques naturales tropicales en San Miguel, Petén, Guatemala. Tesis M.Sc., CATIE, Turrialba. 163 p. Guevara, M., Villamizar, F. 2001. Estadísticas del sector agropecuario de Centroamérica y Belice 1989-1998”; RUTA, Documento de Trabajo No. 4. 14
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