José Rafael Lozada had systematically monitored forest plots for almost 25 years in the Caparo Forest Reserve, the last tropical rainforest of Venezuela’s western plains, when about 300 peasant families entered the reserve in January 2018, seeking to establish crop plots. “We, students and professors, went to the field to talk with the invaders, face to face, and it was very tense,” says Lozada, emeritus ecology professor from the University of the Andes (ULA) in western Venezuela. Venezuela has some of the longest monitoring projects of forest plots established in the tropics, through which researchers seek to understand how old-growth forests function. Caparo is one of them. “It was a pioneering” project in the Amazon Basin, says Rafael Herrera Fernández, emeritus researcher from the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, who started monitoring forest plots in the Río Negro Basin, in the state of Amazonas, in 1973. “You had many scientists for a long time in many plots measuring thousands and thousands of trees, working with local people”, he says. But in recent years, both the forests and research efforts have become increasingly threatened by the country’s social and economic crises. Jacaranda copaia tree in the Caimital dry forest in the Venezuelan plains. Image taken during one of the re-measurement campaigns. Image by Emilio Vilanova. Some of the plots studied by ULA scientists date to the early 1950s, when Jean Pierre Veillon and Hans Lamprecht, two Swiss forestry engineers and ULA professors, established the first plots. Veillon himself designated 72 plots…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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