Restoring conservation forests in northern Thailand and the monitoring of frugivorous birds: 1by David Blakesley and Stephen Elliott, OBC Bulletin 31, June 2000 Although Thailand has one of the most extensive systems of conservation areas in Asia, deforestation remains a serious problem. Since establishing the countrys first national parks in the 1960s, Thailand's forest cover has been reduced from 53% of the country (1) to about 22.8% or 111,010 km2 (2). Unofficial estimates, however, put Thailand's forest cover at less than 20% (3). In 1989 the government banned commercial logging; a ban that remains in force today. Nevertheless, the annual rate of forest loss remains at approximately 1%. Illegal logging and agricultural expansion are the main causes of deforestation. Consequently, today large parts of the country, including extensive areas in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, are covered in degraded forest or grasslands dominated by herbaceous weeds. Over most of northern Thailand, large vertebrates such as wild elephants, rhinos and wild cattle are either gone or on the brink of disappearing and many of the larger bird species such as hornbills are barely surviving. In the south, there is perhaps no better example than the current threat to the last remaining known population of Gurney's Pitta Pitta gurneyi at Khao Nor Chuchi, which is discussed elsewhere in this Bulletin.
Restoring conservation forests A positive development in Thailand in recent years has been the rapid increase in public awareness of the problems caused by deforestation. It is now generally accepted that further forest loss will cause more extreme floods and droughts, damage to watersheds, loss of biodiversity and impoverishment of rural communities. Complete protection of all remaining forest is unlikely, due to economic and legal constraints. Therefore, to maintain the current level of forest cover, or indeed to increase it, deforestation must be balanced by reforestation. This need is reflected in the National Forest Policy, which stipulates that 40% of the country should be forested, including 25% designated as conservation forest. In an attempt to work towards this target, many former logging concessions were designated as national parks or wildlife sanctuaries after the logging ban. This enlarged the protected areas system to 91 national parks and 42 wildlife sanctuaries, covering more than 73,000 km2 or 14.3% of the country (as of 24/12/99, data from the Royal Forest Department). Consequently, many conservation areas were already extensively deforested before they acquired protected status. If such areas are to fulfil their statutory functions of wildlife conservation and watershed protection, the native forest must be restored. Rehabilitation and restoration of degraded ecosystems are extremely important components of in situ conservation, as identified in the Convention on Biodiversity, but research on the biological aspects of the problem has been neglected. Attempts to recreate natural forest ecosystems are hindered by their complexity. Any individual forest type may contain several hundred tree species, each of which may have evolved intricate relationships with hundreds of other organisms, such as herbivores, pollinators and seed-dispersers. Restoration of natural forest ecosystems, therefore, requires a vast amount of ecological information, of which only a small fraction is currently known. We need to understand how forests regenerate naturally, identify the factors limiting regeneration and develop effective methods to counteract them and thus accelerate regeneration, for example through planting tree seedlings. |
