Saving the rainforests
Villagers and scientists are working side by side in Wanang.
Helped by local villagers in an extraordinary four-year undertaking, scientists marked, identified and recorded almost 300,000 trees.
In 2000, the start of something remarkable happened in the Madang Province that put Papua New Guinea at the forefront of global efforts to understand and preserve the world’s great tropical rainforests.
The people of Wanang, an isolated community about 100 kilometres south-west of Madang in the rugged Middle Ramu District, set aside a permanent, 10,000-hectare conservation area.
They already lived in the third-biggest tropical rainforest wilderness on the planet (covering much of the island of New Guinea), after the Amazon and Congo Basins, but also wanted to ensure that their pristine wilderness home wouldn’t fall prey to logging, or any other threat, including climate change.
With advice from the Madang-based environmental group New Guinea Binatang Research Centre (BRC), they set aside the conservation area; and it was just the beginning.
Fourteen years later, backed by a multinational force of scientists as well as by government and private enterprise, Wanang’s conservation initiative is the focus of an ambitious project that has put it in the vanguard of rainforest research and that could help preserve such wilderness areas for generations to come.
In 2008, John Swire & Sons (PNG) Limited, through its PNG subsidiary Steamships Trading Company, committed $US250,000 to build a rainforest research station at Wanang. The end result was the Swire Papua New Guinea Rainforest Study (SPRS), its programs co-ordinated by the Centre for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. They are just two of numerous international and PNG institutions now contributing to long-term research at Wanang.
At the heart of the research project has been a monumental undertaking to record and monitor every tree in a large patch of lowland rainforest close to Wanang. And, as part of the research, 18th-century technology adapted to 21st-century needs is helping scientists get closer to the secrets of rainforests than ever before.
In the first stage of what will be a decadeslong monitoring operation, scientists delineated a 50-hectare patch of rainforest. Helped by local villagers in an extraordinary four-year undertaking, scientists marked,
identified and recorded almost 300,000 trees. Every one of them will be examined again regularly over coming decades to enable scientists to learn more about rainforest dynamics and the likely effects of threats including deforestation and global warming. The information gained also could facilitate reforestation strategies and sustainable forest industry.
An essential part of the SPRS has been the recruitment and training of local villagers for the hands-on research work, as well as community developments, also funded by Swire/Steamships, including the construction of Wanang’s first school, which now has more than 200 students. The positive effects on the local economy are ongoing.
According to project scientists Vojtech Novotny and George Weiblen, the initial tree-monitoring phase at Wanang was a challenging job made harder by the especially rugged terrain, characterised by an endless series of ravines, ridges and floodplains. Access to Wanang, which was completely isolated before the study began, is by fourwheel-drive vehicle only, and the 50-hectare research plot is a further four to six-hour walk along rough forest tracks.
“With support from Steamships, Swire, US and Czech National Science Foundations and other organisations, we started the survey in 2008 and concluded in 2012,’’ says Novotny. “It was a huge effort involving a team of 20 full-time assistants.
“One element was constructing a precise topographic grid over the rugged terrain while not disturbing the vegetation. We had to measure point to point in this grid, using a digital theodolite – GPS devices are too inaccurate for the job – and it took a three-member team an entire year just to finish this task.’’
Weiblen says the fieldwork has been highly
demanding and has included identification, by local and overseas botanists and other experts, of every tagged tree in the research area.
While the on-ground research will continue for many years, scientists at Wanang recently began looking upwards at what some consider the last terrestrial frontier – the rainforest canopy. And to get closer to an environment that because of gravity and other practical reasons has rarely been studied carefully, they are using an idea first put to use in the late 18th century – passenger-carrying gas balloons.
In the 21st-century adaptation, now being used at Wanang and elsewhere in the world, a 7.4-metre diameter helium balloon carrying one passenger and adjusted in-flight to make it neutrally buoyant, moves across the rainforest canopy while tethered to a twokilometre ropeway and traverses laid in place by helicopter.
Called a canopy bubble, the balloon allows the scientists it carries to study and conduct experiments on the highly biodiverse top layer of the rainforest – the previously inaccessible highest and thinnest branches of the forest – observing its plants, insects and birds in a way never before possible.
In the few months that the canopy bubble has been in use at Wanang, scientists have collected arboreal ants and other treetop insects, some of them previously unknown to science. The scientists are studying the role herbivorous insects play in the canopy (where most of the photosynthesis in rainforests takes place) and what effect the experimental exclusion of their natural enemies, including birds, will have on the canopy foliage.
The Swire rainforest study, although in its infancy, has already made an impact. About a quarter of Wanang’s wider community of 400 people has been employed on the project.
According to Novotny, eight young Wanang workers are being trained in research, including two who are studying birds (there are more than 100 species in Wanang), while others are becoming experts on plants, fruit flies and butterflies.
Novotny says the Swire station hosts regular training for diverse groups of PNG and overseas students, and the Wanang community, helped by the UK Darwin Initiative for Survival of the Species, is exploring further ways to benefit from their forest conservation.
“Supporting Wanang as well as BRC (which is essential to the survival of Wanang) is a highly demanding business,’’ he says.
”However, we have managed to sustain years of activity and hope that we will be able to continue.’’
As Weiblen says, sustaining such largescale and long-term environmental science will require the continued partnership of the Wanang people, government agencies, NGOs, the business community and other donors.
The sentiment is echoed by Steamships, which has called upon other corporate and philanthropic entities to back the project.