Anything Pinoy

At the crack of dawn, volunteer-residents of San Miguel, Danao town are busy “unearthing” young tree seedlings and other species of flora and fauna buried under the thick cogon jungle in the grasslands of Bohol province.

Barangay San Miguel, Danao is the country’s first Assisted Natural Regeneration town (ANR), a success story that is.

“This is not a new technology. It has successfully restored forests in Sabah, Malaysia. We can actually bring our forests back,” Pat Dugan, senior forestry expert and president of Bagong Pagasa Foundation, said.

The ANR is a viable means of restoring biodiversity in forest rehabilitation, and helps speed up the growth of young tree seedlings by pressing down pesky cogon grasses to expose them to sunlight and other nature’s growth stimuli, instead of lying dormant under a carpet of grasses, such as the ever-present Imperata cylindrica, more commonly known as cogon, Neria Andin, FMB Assistant Director, said.

Cogon and talahib or boho grasses are young forests’ mortal enemies, due to the vulnerability both to intentional and accidental fires.

In 2007, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Forest Management Bureau-Department Of Environment and Natural Resources and the Bagong Pag-Asa Foundation, Inc. initiated ANR in Bohol.

It is now being eyed as one of the options to preserve the country’s vibrant vegetation and rare animal inhabitants.

Around the world today, especially in the tropics, deforestation has become one of the most serious threats to biodiversity conservation, livelihood systems, ecosystem functions, peoples’ welfare and sustainable development.

FAO said that on average, the global figure of deforestation has been 14.6 million hectares per year between 1990 and 2000.

Despite Bohol’s unprecedented growth in ecotourism, community teamwork kept them ahead over other tourist spots in the country by protecting its rich biodiversity.

ANR is a no-brainer, anchored on its three principal components: forest fire prevention, control cogon and other fire-prone grasses and manually nurse the growth of existing root stock and young tree seedlings that sprout from seeds carried by natural dispersal agents, such as birds, other animals, man and wind.

These merely await assistance to regenerate, and there is certainly no need to spend for costly seedling production, planting and replanting, Andin said.

Traditional reforestation costs P35,000 to P40,000 per hectare, but ANR costs about half this amount, as it utilizes dormant seeds in the ANR area.

Volunteers, mostly residents of Danao themselves, first locate the wildlings under the grass, ringweed these for more or less than one meter in diameter then mark the spot with a stake.

Afterward, they “press” the remaining grass using a lodging board.

They are also tasked to locate wildlings in sites where talahib and other canes like runo are dominant and remove much of the surrounding weeds to “eliminate the competition”.

Reviving the forests, Dugan said, serves residents in more ways than one, as it shields them from natural disasters, provides shed, livelihood and idyllic setting to pass on to the generation to come.

The ANR team believes these plants provide resources that local people can depend on. With ANR, the community is also assured of stable water supply, cleaner air and more pleasant surroundings.

“If carried out well, ANR offers vast potentials for livelihood mostly for Danao’s residents which rely on nito and pandan for handicrafts,” Dugan said.

The forest rehabilitation team works double time as they believe time is of the essence as it takes more than eight to 10 centuries to restore protective vegetation.

Aside from Bohol, far north in Luzon, Sitio Ariada, Barangay Alangan, Limay, Bataan and down south in Mindanao’s Barangay Balagunan, Sto. Tomas, Davao del Norte, trees are also sprouting everywhere amidst grasses with the help of ANR.

These project sites have an area of approximately 20 hectares of degraded forestland with diverse vegetative cover dominated by cogon and related fire-prone grass species.

Bohol is signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which advocates global effort to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity especially in the midst of disasters and climate change.

“ANR is a response to this urgent need. But more than complying with CBD initiatives, which is of concern to national officials, our greatest concern is in meeting local people’s needs and interests,” Dugan said.