Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity

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Assessment and Monitoring 10 THE GLOBAL CANOPY PROGRAM – A NEW ALLIANCE FOR INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF FOREST CANOPIES IN MAINTAINING A STABLE PLANET Andrew W. Mitchell Director, ICAN-Global Canopy Program, Halifax House, University of Oxford, 6-8 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UB, United Kingdom E-mail: k.secoy@global canopy.org Keywords: Forest, canopy, Carbon, Biodiversity, Collaboration The forest canopy is often popularly described as nature’s last biological frontier. The amount of biodiversity contained there represents one of the greatest concentrations of life on earth. In addition, the canopy is where ‘life meets the atmosphere’. The fluxes of gases which occur at this interface are increasingly thought to play a significant role in maintaining the earth’s climate. A challenge for science here is that little is known of the structure/function relationships that occur in forest canopies. We do not even know the true extent of the biodiversity there. Further the precise mechanism and extent of the exchange of gasses across the leaf atmosphere boundary including the uptake of carbon in the canopy and its transfer to the soil, is also largely unknown. Why is this important? First, current human induced biodiversity loss is the 6th Earth extinction event which will dramatically alter future evolution on the planet. Second, the extent of our ignorance about biodiversity in forest canopies is both an economic threat through lost commercial opportunity and its value is therefore underestimated by governments, who cannot plan on an evolutionary time scale, and discount the value of biodiversity. Third, our almost complete lack of understanding of structure-function relationships in forest canopies and their impact on maintaining global environmental conditions is a major threat to human welfare in many countries at the local and regional level. Fourth, a lack of understanding at all levels of the role of forests in climate change, especially as sequesters of carbon, has led to a major breakdown in the implementation of the one treaty which is designed to fix the problem - namely the Kyoto protocol. Why is our understanding so poor? First we lack the scientific data on which to make sound predictions. Essentially this is because of the difficulty of access in forest canopies which has delayed the implementation of experiments other than those which ask: ‘what is there?’ as opposed to manipulative investigations asking ‘how does it work?’ or ‘how will it change?’ Canopy science has now emerged from the pioneering days of 30 years ago using monkeys or climbing ropes to access the crowns of tall trees to the large scale operations of today using canopy cranes, dirigibles, towers and other techniques which enable repeatable access with ease but often at considerable expense. Second, the natural sciences have not been able to corner the market in major funding for projects in its field in the way that the physical sciences have. Table 1 is a comparison between the recent funding priorities for the major physical projects and canopy science under consideration and by the European Science Foundation. Projects on forest canopies have not attracted the support of Governmental science funding bodies at a level commensurate with either the scale or urgency of the problem to be addressed. Part of the reason for this may be that no such program has been presented with international support which addresses the scientific questions at the right scale and that can dramatically capture the attention of the political aspects of the fundraising process which could benefit from the results and from the positive public attention the program could generate in terms of education and conservation. 43
Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity The Global Canopy Program Following the Tropical Rainforest Canopies: Ecology and Management international conference at Oxford in 1998, a number of participants, including the author, convened a workshop under the auspices of the International Canopy Network (ICAN) and funded by European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation, to address these issues. The outcome of that meeting was a Forest Canopy Planning Workshop Report (Nadkarni et al., 2000) at which the following resolution was agreed by 29 experts present from 9 countries: “We propose an integrated, coordinated study of canopies across major environmental and management gradients to investigate the role of forest canopies in maintaining global biodiversity, global environmental conditions, and the sustainability of forests.” A year later in November 2000, with funding from two UK foundations the Global Canopy Program (GCP) Secretariat Office, working in close partnership with ICAN was established in Oxford. Its mission is as follows: 1. To seek to create the international framework for implementing the central research vision and goals of the Global Canopy Program as conceived at the Oxford canopy workshop, 2. To determine the resources needed and to forge the international partnerships in research, education, training and conservation who wish to have a stake in the program 3. To combine these groups into an alliance of organisations who support and expect to benefit from a proposal, which seeks funding at a level necessary for the task on a global scale, for submission to major national and international donors to implement the program. This initiative will be formally launched at the 3rd International Canopy Conference in Cairns, Australia in June 2002. Since November an international Steering Committee and Science Advisory Committee has been set up plus a network of in-country representatives. Research has been carried out into the scientific projects currently in progress around the world related to the issues above. Representatives of these groups have been contacted and all have expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of collaborating in a global program of research provided funding is available and a mechanism for such collaboration exists. Institutions and projects currently contacted have been divided the into three potential networks: 1. Canopy Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function Network 2. Canopy Climate Change Network 3. Canopy Conservation, Policy and Education Network It is clear that those in the Climate change network are already quite well organised internationally often using standard protocols, shared data bases and an extensive network of towers to obtain measurements of gas fluxes in the canopy. These include such organisations as Fluxnet, and the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA). Globally, funding for these programs is already at the $100 - $150 million level. (P. Jarvis, pers. comm.) Those projects concerned with biodiversity and ecosystem studies are growing rapidly but are less well organised internationally as a network with few common protocols or shared databases. These include ten canopy access jib cranes now situated in both temperate and tropical forests plus numerous towers, walkways, and other individual canopy access systems such as the Canopy Operation Permanent Access System (COPAS) under development and Operation Canopée. Extensive forest related education and conservation organisations are in existence but few specifically focussed on forest canopies or the science being conducted within them. The flow of information at the policy level from canopy science has yet to be investigated but may benefit from better international co-ordination and it 44
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