A Caribbean island once full of lush trees and teeming with wildlife is nearly completely deforested and undergoing a mass extinction event. Haiti is closer to losing its rich biodiversity than almost any other country in the world, according to new research from Temple University scientist Blair Hedges. In a paper published November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and his co-authors revealed that Haiti has lost almost all its virgin forests.
He explained that Haiti is at the forefront of a global trend, with species disappearing at to 1, times the normal rate. Known as ecosystem services, they include things like when a forest, for example, helps to clean the air and water and prevents soil erosion. Over the next five years, as Wampler crisscrossed the country for his research, he began to undergo a cognitive dissonance.
I could see it with my own eyes. He began searching for the original source of the forest-cover statistic. Some scientific and development literature used a 4 percent estimate that came from the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency.
That number also struck him as too low. He enlisted several students and began gathering high-resolution imagery of the island from LandSat, the database operated by the United States Geological Survey. Stitching together images from and , he formed a mosaic that covered the entire country. He combined the images in three wavelengths to highlight vegetation and then trained a computer to spot trees in the images. When the results came back, his first thought was that he had to do the whole process again.
Wampler wondered whether they had set a sufficient minimum area for tree cover. He ran the analysis again. Foreign governments, charities, development banks, and the foreign media tend to present this relationship as an indisputable fact.
Environmentalists and development experts have drawn a connection between overpopulation, ecological devastation and poverty for decades. Such narratives can also dehumanize. The study hinted at a different, more interesting story, one of a resource-challenged people who created have a unique relationship with their trees through adaptation and management. Many narratives about Haiti, according to anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, are uninformed and ahistorical. Rather than applaud this landmark in the history of human freedom, governments around the world viewed the successful slave insurrection with horror.
By analyzing aerial photography and satellite images, researchers discovered that primary forest cover in Haiti shrank from 4. They report that 42 of Haiti's 50 largest mountains have lost all of their primary forests and the country is already undergoing a mass extinction of its wildlife due to habitat loss. Other species at risk include the Hispaniolan solenodon , a large shrew-like animal native to Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic.
One of the oldest mammals on the planet, the solenodon survived the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. In all, the survey turned up 28 species that are endemic to specific mountaintops—including several new frog species. Hedges says there were likely many more, but as their habitat disappeared, so did they. Along with the extinctions of unique animals found nowhere else, Haiti's deforestation has another consequence: landslides and flooding. The researchers found that, without tree roots to hold soil, mountains tended to lose their topsoil to erosion soon after deforestation.
And without trees to sop up rainwater, lowland areas are much more prone to catastrophic floods. He pointed to a flooding event in that killed more than 1, people in a single town. Hedges says that Haiti's deforestation is largely driven by small-scale farming and charcoal production, which involves harvesting wood and heating it to remove water and volatile compounds. Doing this turns wood into a source of fuel that can be burned without producing as much smoke.
Around 11 million people live in Haiti, and many of them depend on wood charcoal for fuel and subsistence farming for food.
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