January 2010: Analog Forestry

Anuar Romero and Jenny Demarco of the Falls Brook institute, traveled from La Ceiba, Honduras to collaborate with Guanaja Mangrove Restoration. Anuar and Jenny are managers of the Fall's Brook Institute sponsored reforestation project at the Cuero y Salado wildlife refugue (CyS). CyS is a river estuary on the mainland of Honduras. Mangroves and associated flora were largely destroyed by past agricultural use. The Falls Brook Institute is collaborating with the local community to implement a forest restoration technique known as Analog Forestry. In short, an area is surveyed to determine appropriate species diversity and those species of  trees most beneficial to humans and the health of the environment are selected for planting.

Anuar and Jenny were just starting to work on mangrove restoration in their area, so they came to Guanaja so they could learn from our experience and we could learn about Analog Forestry. We surveyed GMR's test plots and restoration sights. We also visited mangrove areas all around the perimeter of Guanaja Island. We made "natural succession" surveys in a few places. This helped us determine what the species distribution of a natural recovered area looks like and also how some restored areas are doing.

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Anuar Romero and Jenny Demarco from the Cuero y Salado (CyS) wildlife refugue on the mainland, came over to Guanaja to collaborate and help survey the area.  They are both managers for the Fall's Brook Institute's forest restoration project at CyS. They demonstrated a few things about their Analog Forestry system.

This beautiful caterpillar is also quite poisonous and can deliver a serious sting.

In areas with living mangroves, we found large numbers of bird nests like the one above.

Cross sections of the fauna help us understand more about healthy forests.

These basic cross section drawings are a first step in Analog Forestry.

Above is an area that was restored by hand planting several years ago with help from ESNACIFOR. The uniform continuous section of red mangroves was the area planted. In areas we are working on now we intend to also plant white and black mangroves to increase diversity. 

For a lot more about Analog Forestry click below>