The Milgis Trust

Category: Forest, Forest Fires, Matthews range, Northern Frontier District | Date: Dec 07 2008 | By: milgistrust

Richard, Thank you for your support on this Matthews Saga… I am delighted that you have brought these valuable forests in Northern Kenya to the lime light… This whole thing with Luca managing to get a licence to cut a substantial count of fully grown indigenous trees for research, will funnily enough I hope, end up helping these forests, I’m not sure about the reason for cutting the trees for research??, BUT.. below is more from Luca to try and convince us…What is more exciting hopefully the Kenya forest service will show more interest in these forests… Instead of only taking money from them, IE this research permit, and camping fees up at Mt Nyiru, etc….Each time they come for fees, I ask what the forestry are doing about the forest fires, they can not answer… I even wrote to them to ask them, and have had no reply… A couple of comments from your blog, for the record… Re the size of the gaps made in the forest…either Samburu, do not know what a meter is, or Lucas meters are long…We will send somebody to check again!.. so the record is strait.. BUT to me this is not the issue… The issue is the fact in this day and age a researcher was able to get a licence to cut, live indigenous trees…After all that has been said and done in Kenya lately about cutting trees… I actually thought there was a total ban… The Matthews range is Samburu district!! And the amount he paid or promised to pay to the community about a month or so after they had evicted him, and after the forestry had suspended his research, because he had not agreed with the community, is in the region of 100000/- not 150000/-… Just for the record.. Any way your support on this issue is very very much appreciated, and Wildlife Direct is is an unbelievable help to conservation… Thank you for the idea and for setting it up.. .. salaams Helen..

Matthews peak, taken from the north…

Lucas Justifications….

Implicit in much conservation thinking is the idea that the activities of local human peoples are damaging to the environment. The direct consequence of this is that local people are often excluded from protected areas, sometimes with little regard for their rights, but also with little appreciation that - as any other species - humans might have a role in the balance of natural ecosystems. Let me clarify with an example: we all agree that lions have a key role in controlling herbivore populations in African savannas. When lions disappear, chances are that the entire ecosystem will suffer. Now, my question is: given that humans have lived in Africa for longer than anywhere else, why can’t we hypothesize that local peoples might have a key role in the preservation of African ecosystems - including forests? Are we sure that a forest without human impacts is by default better that a forest whose structure is partly affected by the activities of local peoples living in that area? I guess that we are not at all sure. Research is badly needed on this subject.

I studied local nomadic peoples and their effects on Afromontane forests for some years. Let me summarize a few key facts. First, forest area in the Mathews range is 26,300 ha. Assuming 1% yearly growth, this means that approximately 36,000 cubic meters of wood are produced each year in the forest.

My estimates suggest that about 10,000-20,000 trees are *dropped by local people in the Mathews range during drought years. In normal years it is less than half, about 3,000-6,000 trees.

On average, a tree in the Mathews range forest has a diameter of 9.8 cm and a height of 8.3m. These data are from 800 trees that I measured in the forest in 2006-2007. With these measurements, we can calculate that an average tree has a volume of 0.25 cubic meters, which means that even in drought years, local people drop less than 5,000 cubic meters of trees in the forest. This is much less that the average yearly natural growth. Of course, I have not considered forest fires (which, however, are much less frequent now than a few years ago), and my estimates are very rough, but a case can be made that after all, human use of forest resources in the Mathews range might still be within sustainability levels.

Ecological knowledge tells us that Afromontane forest canopies have a discontinuous, “gappy” structure. This is not the Amazon: trees here are comparatively small. In Afromontane forests, 10-30% of the area is actually made up by gaps in the canopy, whose diameter is on average 29 meters (n = 232 measures). More than 50% of these gaps show signs of human activities, therefore I hypothesize that humans have an important role in the creation of canopy gaps in Afromontane forests.

Forest gaps are also important for wildlife. Herbivores preferentially graze in the gaps. Endemic chameleon species might be gap-specialists, and bird diversity in a gap is approximately twice as much than in “undisturbed” forest.

Now, I am not jumping to the conclusion that we should conserve the Afromontane forest by dropping trees. Much more humbly, I am asking whether the activities of local human peoples might be important in the maintenance of forest species diversity. If that was true, then by managing these activities in the proper way, we will achieve a win-win outcome, in which local people could maintain their lifestyles and at the same time contribute to the conservation of species diversity. Wouldn’t this scenario be enticing?

This is the theoretical justification of my research; now let me describe the experimental settings. In my experiment, I selected 20 small plots within an “undisturbed” tract of the forest. For two years I studied ecosystems processes and structure before the creation of a gap. Then, last August, I (with the help of two friends) created gaps in ten of the survey plots. The remaining ten plots will be left undisturbed to provide experimental control. The ten artificial gaps are 24m diameter (i.e. 12m radius), that is, approximately similar to the “average” forest gap in an Afromontane forest.

Concerns were raised over the ecological impact of my “destruction”. Please consider that the total area of my artificial gaps is tiny - 0.45 ha in all in a forest that is 60,000 times larger. Also consider that gaps are natural components in this ecosystem, nothing alien is being introduced here.

If you are thinking that this could have been done in “natural” gaps without the need of dropping any trees, you are wrong. There is too much variation in size, shape and age within natural gaps. By using an experimental approach I have zeroed many sources of variation: all my gaps were created at the same time, they have the same size and shape. This will allow to record changes in ecosystem processes with a detail that has probably never been achieved before in tropical forest research.

Now let me conclude. Readers of this blog called me “idiotic” “inconsiderate”, and used words as “catastrophe”, “madness”, “destruction” etc. Some snubbed at the “findings” of my “research”. Those people might want to reconsider their judgment. I am a serious naturalist, I spent years working in this region and I think I am in my rights when I ask to be judged on the basis of truth and not rhetoric. Nothing in my research is a secret. Those who wish to come and see are welcome at any time.

With my best regards, Luca

Helens comments on your justifications… *The trees that the Samburu people cut down for there cows are usually pretty small.. Or they prune big ones… We are working hard on teaching them how to prune, so that next year, that same tree can help them…Don’t get me wrong, we don’t support any one cutting trees, but I do understand that people will tend to ‘destroy’ if there livelihood is on its last legs…