Last night, I had the privilege of
giving a guest lecture to the Biodiversity Club at Zamorano University about an
hour south of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I
spoke about the “Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management.” My basic message was that managing natural
resources requires an integration of information and actions pertaining to
wildlife, habitat, and people. About 25
students, faculty, and staff attended.
The lecture was more of a rolling discussion stimulated by slides I put
together from lectures I’ve given back at Cornell and modified to include
issues from Honduras.
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After my evening lecture/discussion, I was honored to get this photo with one of the
Assistant Professors (left) and two students. Note the Syracuse University sweatshirt
worn by one of the students. I almost felt like I was back home in central New York.
Photo credit: Oliver Komar.
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We
didn’t talk only about birds, but bird conservation was certainly a major topic
of discussion. For example, we talked
about the situation pertaining to protected areas here in Honduras –
particularly National Parks. There are
about 17 National Parks in Honduras.
Each of them has a core area of protection – often at the highest
elevations, in an effort to ensure protection of water sources for the many
communities that surround the parks. And
by surround, I mean communities that exist within the so-called “buffer zones”
of the national parks. The buffer zones
include areas that certainly deserve protection, but often heavily disturbed by
human development (both for agriculture and for human habitation). See the accompanying picture of the map for
an example.
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A map of Azul Meambar National Park (total area encompassed in yellow and green).
The green represents the core area that is the highest elevation and which is supposed
to be off-limits to human development. The yellow shows the buffer zone -- a protected
part of the National Park, but an area containing many small communities and which
is heavily disturbed by human development. Photo credit: Jody Enck.
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The
communities that exist within the buffer zones not only impact the wildlife and
habitat within that buffer zone, but sometimes (perhaps usually), encroach on
the core protected area. You can see
examples of clearing on slopes for planning of corn, coffee, beans, bananas, or
other crops, and for livestock pasturing.
Human habitation follows as local residents build structures to stay in
while working in the encroached fields.
Developmental
pressures and subsistence needs are great.
The situation is likely to only get worse as human population
increases. The students who attended my
discussion pointed out to me that it is not only the responsibility of the
government to protect biodiversity within these protected areas. It also is the responsibility of people who
live in these communities within the buffer zones. One challenge is that most of those residents
have no idea about the biodiversity that exists in these areas, why that
biodiversity is important to them and to others, or about how their actions
negatively affects that biodiversity.
This
point was driven home to me this morning as I accompanied a class from Zamorano
University to the Finca Agroecologica Santa Inez. A
sustainable agro-forestry area owned and managed by the university on the
slopes above the main campus, which is down in the valley. Every day during the trimester, students spend
half a day in classes and half in a learning-by-doing module that includes a
lot of hands-on activities. One week,
the classes are in the morning and learning-by-doing in the afternoon. Then the next week the schedule flips and
learning-by-doing is in the morning.
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Students in a learning-by-doing module conducting an eBird transect count
in the Finca Agroecologica at Zamorano University. Photo credit: Jody Enck.
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This
morning, 11 students from an agro-ecology class conducted a bird census along a
transect in the Finca Agroecologica. Most
of these students were not birders or naturalists of any type – fairly representative
of the broader population in that sense.
When asked how many bird species we might see on our transect (of a
couple kilometers), responses ranged from 8 to 20. We saw and/or heard 48 species. The point driven home to me was that even
these ecology students are relatively unaware of the biodiversity right here in
the campus area. Of course, as ecology
students, their discussion of the morning’s activity focused their attention on
the need to help others, especially those living in and adjacent to protected
areas, to become aware of the biodiversity around them, the importance of it,
and the threats to that biodiversity that exist because of human development.
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The entire class of friendly and engaging ecology students who I got to
accompany while they participated in a learning-by-doing model in the
Finca Agroecologica Santa Inez at Zamorano University.
Photo Credit: Oliver Komar. |
It is
not just a matter of putting a line on a map around a biodiverse area and
saying that people have to stay out.
There needs to be some tangible value back to the local residents from
that biodiversity. When eco-tourists
come and visit these areas and hire local guides, eat in local restaurants, and
stay in local hotels, the local residents can become more aware that
maintaining biodiversity is one way to attract economic benefit to the local
area. That is why one important aspect
of establishing sister birding clubs likely will be to encourage and facilitate
visits by northerners to these areas.
