By Stewart Mior in News — Nov 17, 2024

Venezuelan Forest Research Faces Crisis Amid Collapse 🌳

The fragmentation of political control is also taking a toll on Amazonian research in Venezuela.

Image by Rhett Butler.

This article by Tony Frankie Mawad originally appeared in Mongabay.

Venezuela’s economic, institutional and economic collapse has put at risk a long-standing forest plot research network.
With highly biodiverse forests covering about half of Venezuela’s total area, the country has some of the longest-running forest monitoring projects in the tropics, which represented a pioneering effort in understanding old-growth forest dynamics in the Amazon Basin.
Falling budgets, a humanitarian crisis affecting personnel and logistics, the rise of armed gangs, and encroachment of logging and agriculture are some of the key factors threatening to halt research in the field.
2016 was the last year with still significant measurements in the field; today, projects lack permits to apply for international funding, but scientists continue to advocate for keeping efforts ongoing.

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.

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 in nine Venezuelan states between 1953 and 1978.

“It’s an effort rarely seen in the tropics,” says Emilio Vilanova, a tropical forest engineer who started monitoring forest plots with ULA in 2004 and now works with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

And yet, most of ULA’s research has stopped since 2016 due to a lack of funding and logistical obstacles, as Venezuela underwent the largest economic contraction outside of war in modern history from 2013 onward, resulting in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the region.

“I haven’t been able to go the field to take data for news projects. There’s a lot to do,” Lozada says. “But we are paralyzed, with our hands tied, and while this nationwide disaster continues, we won’t be able to do anything.”

The confrontation in Caparo is a sample of the challenges brought on by this crisis. After months of negotiations, the Venezuelan government decided to expel the Caparo peasants in April. By then, however, they’d already burned and felled parts of the forest, which is home to 547 plant species and had already been reduced to only 10% of its original area by logging companies. In that time, they’d also set up around 140 crop plots, some up to 4 hectares (10 acres), and damaged some of the forest plots studied by researchers.

“We haven’t been able to do new measurements”, Lozada says. “And it’s not worth it anymore, the project is damaged, the forest is damaged.” The research station, now protected by the armed forces, remains.

Almost half of Venezuela is covered by forests. The country’s south hosts about 7% of the Amazon Rainforest, as well as most of the world’s tepuis or tabletop mountains, known for their unique ecosystems. The Guiana Shield, one of the world’s oldest geological formations, underlying much of southern Venezuela, has “the largest extension of undisturbed tropical forests in the planet,” says Lionel Hernández, an emeritus professor specialized in tropical forest ecology from the National Experimental University of Guiana in southern Venezuela. The long-term and systematic nature of the forest plots projects has been “crucial to quantify patterns and ecological changes” in forests that are not fully studied, he tells Mongabay.

These projects have also allowed scientists to understand the dynamics of the forests and how they react to sustainable forestry, says Lozada, who studied reserves designed for felling. In Caparo, for instance, he found out that preserving a residual part of the forest could lead to a recovery of the felled area in 20 or 25 years.

“This research allowed [us] to delineate how forest should be managed,” he says.

More importantly, monitoring has also revealed a “sustained increase in trees’ mortality” in the Amazonand the cloud forests of the Andes, says Vilanova, which could be an effect of longer droughts caused by climate change.

But Venezuela’s economic, institutional and economic collapse threatens the remaining forest plot networks. Funding is scarce, the toll of the humanitarian crisis has affected personnel and logistics, armed gangs have risen as the state loses control over its territory, and political sectarianism has affected many of the country’s scientific institutions.

No greens for the greens

Despite the challenges facing Venezuela’s megadiverse forests, Venezuelan scientists are also limited by the collapse of autonomous public universities’ budgets, which are allocated by the government and have been drastically limited not only by the economic crisis, but also as a policy by the governments of Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, to assert political control over these institutions. In 2022, for example, ULA received only 3.21% of the budget assigned by the ministry. Mario Bonucci, the university’s president, described it as “budgetary asphyxiation.”

“Field work requires physical effort, and it happens in places that are difficult to access,” says Hernández, who oversaw plots in the Guiana Shield. He says financial and logistical restrictions have led to forest monitoring being carried out “irregularly,” with the result that there are “periods with information gaps during [forest] census years.” Besides short-time studies, he adds, there are no constant monitoring studies of regional forest cover or fauna monitoring in the plots.

The lack of funds has reduced the number of vehicles available to travel to remote regions and the possibility of establishing camps deep within the rainforest, like the Venezuelan Amazon. “In 2000 or 2004, I could travel to the field with my own salary,” Lozada says. “I used to use my personal car, [an] SUV.”

With professors’ wages reduced to less than $50 a month, the lowest in Latin America, researchers depend on university resources, which are also scarce. “There’s one SUV remaining for the whole school,” Lozada says. “It’s used by everyone, and we are hoping it won’t break down. There’s no money to fix it.”

Technical and research staff have also joined the 8 million Venezuelans who have left the country during the 25 years of Chavista governments, says Vilanova. The loss of young talent is turning Venezuela into “a science orphan,” says Herrera Fernández. Nevertheless, many of the country’s forest plot monitoring projects have received aid from international collaborative monitoring networks of which they’re a part. The plots founded by the Swiss engineers, for example, joined RAINFOR in 2002, a network of hundreds of Amazonian researchers.

“These networks have allowed a global-scale analysis of the functioning of tropical forests, especially as mechanisms to mitigate climate change,” Vilanova says. “We’ve seen the Amazon’s carbon removal capability has declined due to the death of trees due to longer and stronger droughts.”

Through some of the hundreds of studies created through the data collected by RAINFOR, for example, scientists have found that the Amazon has more than 10,000 tree species, yet more than half of all individuals belong to just 227 “hyperdominant” species.

But while the networks represent an important support for projects in Venezuela, other countries like Brazil and Peru are usually prioritized for funding, Vilanova says.

“The periodicity of the measurements has been notably reduced,” he says. “2016 was the last year of great measurements and the state of many of the plots is uncertain.”

Nevertheless, through funding from the Andean Forest Network, ULA managed to restart monitoring some of its oldest plots in the mountains near Mérida in 2022. Also, the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), in tandem with the ForestPlots.net facility, may issue some funding soon to revisit some of the plots that haven’t been measured since 2016, Vilanova says.

Politics in the rainforest

Venezuela’s government has turned increasingly authoritarian ever since Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, ushering waves of political conflict and institutional takeovers that have deepened under his successor, Maduro, and have affected the survival of scientific projects and institutions.

For example, Lozada, whose research was focused on sustainable forestry, relied on logging companies’ stations as camps to study forest plots in the remote Imataca Forest Reserve, deep in Venezuelan Amazon, for years.

“If we don’t have camps, we can’t do the research we are doing,” he says. Yet, from 2005 onward, the Chávez government stopped approving the annual plans logging companies had to submit. The remaining companies eventually ceased their operations due to shortages of raw materials once Venezuela’s crisis began.

“These companies died,” Lozada says, which led to the disappearance of the camps and their sustainable forestry plans.

Similarly, as Venezuela drifted into authoritarianism and its institutions became more hermetic, receiving permits to do studies in certain areas became more difficult. Hernández says three institutions — the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, and the National Parks Institute — used to grant permits to his team in the 2000s, allowing him to research areas like the forests of La Escalera in the Sierra de Lema range in southern Venezuela, where more than 500 tree species have been identified.

But despite describing several new species, Hernández’s work was halted. “Despite multiple formal applications, we couldn’t [renew our] permits with the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples from 2008 onward.”

Without the permits, Hernández’s project couldn’t apply for international funding. “Currently, the project’s census, which should be done every two or three years, is paralyzed,” Hernández says.

The fragmentation of political control is also taking a toll on Amazonian research in Venezuela. The creation of the Orinoco Mining Arc in 2016 has led to a gold rush in the Venezuelan Amazon where armed gangs, Colombian guerrillas, the military, companies owned by cronies, and drug traffickers compete for control of the mines. The result has been the highest rate of violent deaths in Venezuela this year and a malaria epidemic, a situation that has affected access to southern areas like the Imataca Forest Reserve that Lozada used to study.

“These are heavily armed delinquents that control access and decide who can go in and who can’t,” he says. Lozada himself has stopped going to southern Venezuela after incidents in which he realized the armed mining gangs were monitoring him.

“Our main challenge is to wait for the country to recover politically, socially, economically, institutionally,” Lozada says. “This is a failed state.”

But the scientists aren’t giving up. According to Vilanova, last year, the researchers received a grant from NERC to restart the monitoring of forest plots across the country’s Amazonian region, including areas of eastern Venezuela, until 2027.

“These networks are not only a part of the scientific heritage of the country,” he says, “but if they are kept or expanded, they could be the base for a system to measure carbon and conserve the biodiversity of Venezuelan forests in the 21^st century.”

The task is crucial, not only for Venezuela but for the world. “Tropical forests absorb almost 30% of all carbon emissions in the world and their conservation is vital to mitigate the effects of climate change,” Vilanova says. “It’s very important to keep up this research.”

Citations:

Brienen, R. J. W., Phillips, O. L., Feldpausch, T. R., Gloor, E., Baker, T. R., Lloyd, J., … Zagt, R. J. (2015). Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink. Nature, 519(7543), 344-348. doi:10.1038/nature14283

Sánchez, M. E., Llambí, L. D., Gámez, L. E., Rodríguez, G., Pelayo, R., Ataroff, M., & Vilanova, E. (2024). Diversity, structure and dynamics of tropical montane forests: Insights from permanent-plot monitoring in the Venezuelan Andes. Ecología Austral, 286-304. doi:10.25260/ea.24.34.2.0.2349

er Steege, H., Pitman, N. C. A., Sabatier, D., Baraloto, C., Salomão, R. P., Guevara, J. E., … Silman, M. R. (2013). Hyperdominance in the Amazonian tree flora. Science, 342(6156), 1243092. doi:10.1126/science.124309

Banner image: Image by Rhett Butler.

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