What I Do

Last week I gave a three-day workshop on community management of forest resources in Santa Cruz, El Rincon with Miguel Alexiades, Patricia Negreros, and Citlalli Lopez. About 40 students from several different institutions and communities participated. We had a first day of basic concepts and made Biltmore sticks (see Biltmore Stick). The second day we went to a nearby tract of tropical dry forest and ran inventory transects and counted and measured trees. Super steep site, and some of the slopes were in excess of 100%. I slipped a lot.

And then we took the data and made a big table showing the density and basal area of different tree species and drew size-class histograms of the most abundant/valuable ones. The final - and most important - step in the whole process is to try to figure out what all of this means in terms of management, i.e. what needs to be done to insure that a species continues to grow and reproduce while it is being exploited. This is what I am try to do in the image above (thx, Miguel). This is what I do for a living. Helping communities define a conceptual path through a forest of data to make things better. For all beings. Gassho. [NOTE: The last day of the workshop ran very late, and we were still talking about diameter distributions and regeneration rates at 9:00 PM].