Forests and trees play a crucial role in human society and are cited as key elements in the strategy towards sustainable development for the African continent. Forests and tree-based systems also support the development of other sectors, such as tourism, agriculture and fisheries, that contribute to rural livelihoods and local and national economies. (IUFRO 2021).
Tropical forests in developing countries are often the breeding ground where development occurs to the detriment of the available natural resources. The result of infrastructure, such as roads and human settlements, aids the creation of access points into the forests in search of high-demand non-timber forest products.
In Cameroon, people depend on trees, yet there is not enough evidence to demonstrate the systemic resilience of the forests. How will forest dynamics change under the interplay of natural ecosystem processes, climate and anthropogenic influence?
This forest food is eaten by the local communities in the forest area of Cameroon.
Good forest management plans will guarantee sustainable use of the existing forests. Appropriate knowledge of the resource is vital to preparing and revising these management plans. Without monitoring, there will be no information on how the forest responds before and after anthropogenic activities such as selective logging and illegal poaching and logging. To make reliable predictions on slow-growing tropical tree species, data collection in permanent sample forests requires an extended monitoring period, considering the long lifespan of tropical trees and the varying tree growth rate according to developmental stages and prevailing environmental conditions.
A handful of the team on the last day of enumerating the last plot. Dr Mokake is standing in the middle, the only female team member.
We were at the Lobekie National Park, which shares a boundary with the Central Africa Republic. The research team included the demarcation team (made up of the local population), the enumeration team (specialists) and military forest guards of the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. This is a National Park, and exploitation is restricted. However, protected areas are rich in flora and fauna biodiversity, attracting poaching and illegal logging. This thus creates conflicts between the local population, foreigners and the administration. Recently, foreign poachers from nearby Central Africa are known to have launched several attacks on and kidnapping local villagers for ransom.
One of the significant challenges encountered is the insecurity issues, which include the killing and kidnapping of individuals that have arisen in recent years along the Sangha Tri-National Forest - part of the study site. Illegal logging and poaching carried out by both locals and neighbouring Central Africans is being prevented by forest guards of the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife.
These are examples of the poaching activities. At a different site, poachers were arrested by the military unit of the Ministry of Forestry and bushmeat confiscated.
Having the military guard with you makes everyone feel uncomfortable as the idea of gunfire becomes a reality in confrontations between the military and foreign poachers. Villagers have become somewhat used to an exchange system with foreign poachers by communicating and negotiating with cigarettes or foodstuffs for poached bushmeat and their freedom. These are examples of some poaching activities by poachers and confiscations by the forest guards of the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, where bushmeat was confiscated.
Though these challenges are being encountered, research must continue as Forestry research is a passion of mine, and the calm of the forest is a well-being exercise for me. It also feels good to be one of the few female contributors in filling the information gap required for the sustainable management of African tropical forests.
This study is carried out in the East region of Cameroon, which is a wet, semi-deciduous tropical forest and part of the Congo Basin. It covers six of the twelve permanent forest monitoring plots previously established in the Jengi Project Area in 2005/2006 in Forest Management Unit (FMU) 10-021 and 10-052.
Article submitted by Seraphine Mokake
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