Stanford scientists help design Madagascar park to preserve rare species ­ and sustain the people living nearby.

BY JANET BASU

Masoala is one of those remote versions of paradise that seemed logical to protect as a nature preserve. An isolated peninsula sticking out like an opposable thumb on the east side of the island of Madagascar, it holds the country's last rain forest, home to some of the rarest animals on Earth like the wide-eyed red-ruffed lemur, the gigantic palm Marojejya darianii, the carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes masoala and a serpent eagle once thought to be extinct.

The 840-square-mile Masoala National Park is the largest untouched wilderness on Madagascar, an island isolated for hundreds of millions of years from nearby Africa and home to thousands of unique species. The designation as a national park will help preserve the rain forest and protect it from the local residents' slash-and-burn rice farming techniques.

When drawing boundaries, planners of the new park knew that they had not only to preserve rare species but to offer a better livelihood for the 45,000 people who live on the peninsula. "Unless the needs of the local people were considered, they had no choice but to continue with their traditional land use practices, leaving them in poverty, with both the land and biodiversity devastated," said Claire Kremen, B.S. '82, who holds a joint appointment with Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology (CCB) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Kremen led a team that designed the park for an international consortium that included the Madagascar government, the WCS, CARE International, the Peregrine Fund and the people of Masoala.

The result was a long-term management plan for the park and its surrounding waters that is still under development. The plan includes the building of markets for renewable resources, such as ecotourism, butterfly farming and the sale of individually cut trees to buyers of high-value "certified sustainable" wood.

"Madagascar can be proud of this model accomplishment. It is a great victory for biodiversity and humanity, and an opportunity to protect the nation's unique species far into the future," Kremen said. "The establishment of the Masoala National Park is an inspiring story of people coming together from many disciplines, social strata, nationalities and ideologies to create a common vision for sustainable management of a region of both exceptional biological richness and economic potential."

Planning for the park came as a result of an intensive three-year campaign by a consortium of the Malagasy Parks Board, the Malagasy Forestry Department and international non-governmental organizations. Most of the scientific data were collected by two teams of biologists, students and specially trained village surveyors led by Kremen and noted Malagasy conservation biologist Vincent Razafimahatratra.

At the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology, scientist Andrew Weiss and a crew of undergraduates took care of the laborious task of entering contours, hydrology and settlement data into a geographic information system, a multi-layered set of maps that was used by the planning team to analyze the scientific and human dimensions of the park's design.

Over 15 months of tramping over steep, steaming, forested terrain with no roads even between villages, biology and village survey teams set out to find the "ground truth" of the maps. Locations were recorded in the field using satellite-based Global Positioning System instruments and sent back along with data about settlements and biology to the Stanford center.

The task was to scientifically choose parts of the peninsula to be set aside as most crucial to support rich diversity of species and establish how much to leave outside as a functional buffer and support zone for sustainable economic alternatives to forest destruction.

At strategically located sampling sites Kremen, Razafimahatratra, the Peregrine Fund team and a group of Malagasy students and researchers conducted biodiversity inventories of birds, mammals and selected insect populations. They also assessed the potential influence on diversity of gradients in rainfall, elevation, and soil type to determine the different kinds of terrain that needed protecting.

A study named "The butterflies way" was particularly helpful. Kremen and colleagues David Lees and Dick Vane-Wright from the Natural History Museum in London followed across the island a group of brown "wood nymph" butterflies that have differentiated into more than 60 species. Each butterfly species occupies its own niche and is an indicator that different types of soil, moisture and other conditions support a different mix of plants and animals. To determine the size of the area to be protected, the scientists assessed the ranges needed by wide-foraging animals like red-ruffed lemurs.

Meanwhile, survey teams, many of them including local residents, were sent to learn the people's sources of food and income, and to map out the areas of nearby forest that the villagers considered their traditional territory.

Most of the people on the peninsula cluster near the coastlines and on the eastern border of the forest, where 369 square miles had already been deforested. The field research and the geographic information system data permitted forestry expert Philip Guillery of the Wildlife Conservation Society to mark the best areas for sustainable tree harvesting.

His analyses showed that the forested zones most useful for people also were the most seriously threatened. The planners proposed that land outside the core protected area be designated a multiple-use management area. "The multiple-use zone would ultimately prevent the spread of deforestation into the core protected area while providing an adequate substitute for the slash-and-burn subsistence economy in the zone," Kremen said.

Masoala Park's protected area covers half of the peninsula and includes management plans for 380 square miles of multiple-use forests bordering the park. The project includes protection for nearby coral reefs and an economic program that provides incentives for local people to manage the forest and coastlines for timber and non-timber products. Woodcutters were given special training to learn sustainable tree harvesting techniques, and last year they made a modest profit. The elders of Masoala villages were escorted by Germaine Tsizas of CARE, the national project director who pushed the technical proposal through many layers of government, to other regions of Madagascar to see the completely denuded and unproductive landscape left by long-term slash-and-burn farming. Most of them declared their interest in learning new farm methods.

Unfortunately, those most involved in the project were unable to celebrate during the formal inauguration ceremonies of the park.

Razafimahatratra died of a heart attack several months prior to its legalization, Tsizas died in a drowning accident only weeks after learning of the park's final ratification, and Kremen was on the other side of the globe attending a conference of ecologists to discuss how preserves like Masoala can serve as a model to protect other vanishing natural systems. ST

Janet Basu is a science writer living in San Francisco.