orou's: Benin fieldwork stories!

This is pretty funny! We went out there, four of us with three water bottles,.. one of my field assistants did not bring his water bottle, he left it in the car! We were at Nigoussourou Khaya population. We worked downstream over 1Km transect on adults Khaya trees and upstream on ten seedlings 10*10 m subplots. It was hot, about 45 degree C out there. At 200 m from the car and we run out of water, mouths were white of dehydratation, we still have three more subplots to monitor! It's getting harder and harder! In this picture, Ulysse, Eric and Aboubakar were fighting to get the last drop of water in my bottle. Who did not bring his part of water? I'll not tell you,.. but for sure, .. it wasn't me! -- But this situation taught us again that once in the field, especially in hot and humid Africa, you've to learn how to manage your water (bottle) throughout the day. Avoid running out of water,.. it is vital!

Something you always need to take into consideration when working in opened "unprotected" areas, is additional human disturbance that may come and create confounding effect in your design. In my study, I am looking at the effect of combined foliage and bark harvest of K. senegalensis on different parameters. I consider logging like any other environemental parameters (it's not always possible to control all the factors). When I revisited my populations to remonitor them, I was sad to realize that some of the Khaya trees over 50 cm DBH were logged and people just put my tags aside and do their job out there. At first, I panic but I think I'll consider "current logging" in the environmental stochasticity modeling. In this picture, Eric Herman, a forestry student (University of Parakou) is standing on a 57 cm DBH K. senegalensis that was logged but the loggers did not have time to collect it!

Penesoulou, one of the most conserved Khaya forest I have ever had in the country. It is the only one Khaya senegalensis population where I am sure pruning did not happen in the past. The population is a gallery forest, not far from the road and I installed two 0.5 Ha plots in there. When I revisited the population this year, almost 1/3 was gone, and 70% of the fruiting trees wipped out by road building crew. Supposedly because they are installing electricity poles on the road, they cut down the biggest Khaya trees in that population and removed the timber. Where did it go? Nobody knows! My whole team was really affected by this, but we put ourselves together and decided to work on the remaining population, considering that the other part was wipped out by a catastrophe. That is how I will be considering it in my modeling. -- Here you can see that some development plans in Africa may lead to threatening biodiversity, favor species extinction!

I had to ask them for a smile! They were sad of what have happened to the Khaya in that population,.. logged! This is my team after the remonitor in the Penesoulou Khaya population, standing right in front of anothe portion that was over-logged: from the left, Rachidi, Uly, Yarou, Kader, Eric!

They logged the Khaya population in Fetekou,.. in the Alibori Reserve Forest a state officially protected but you can see that it does not stop people from coming in and logging timbers. What is bad, is that some state forestry agents who are supposed to protect those forests and species are involved in the illegal logging process. They receive money from logging companies and allow them to go and fell trees without any preliminary study, without knowing the sustainable harvesting limit, without knowing anything at all. But on the flip side, for my study, I found out that I can keep record of the number of trees that were logged in my populations and come out with the logging intensities over some years (maybe 5,.. 10 years? we'll see!). In this picture, two Fulani youngesters were showing the remaining of trees logged and saying that there is a huge competition over Khaya resources between logging companies and Fulani (involved in foliage harvesting!)