Free Malagasy Language Resources

I can't believe it's been nearly a year since I have posted here. After months of digestive illness since returning from Mada last summer, I decided to take the winter break off, so while I think about Mada daily (you all know they have a new government. Right?), I haven't been actively involved.

I just wanted to let you all know about an incredible resource from RPCV Ray Blakney (Mexico 2006-2008). He has been collecting tons of language resources from Peace Corps volunteers around the world as part of his 3rd goal vision (3rd goal of Peace Corps: To inform Americans about the lives of those in other countries). Check out: http://www.livelingua.com/peace-corps-language-courses.php

Here is what he has to say about it:

I am working on a 3rd goal project with the PC regional offices and the main office in DC to try to create an online archive to keep the language training material made all over the world from getting lost. I have created a sub-section on the website my wife and I run...with all the information I have been able to get to date (from over the web and sent to me directly by PC staff and PCV's). I currently have close to 100 languages with ebooks, audios and even some videos.

There is actually over a hundred languages now. While it is somewhat buried in his pay service site (to which I have no opinion nor first hand knowledge of), this is a trove of language material open to the public. If any of you know somebody traveling abroad or soon to be a volunteer and they want to learn a more obscure language than you can find in the bookstore or on Rosetta Stone, send them to this site.

They could definitely use more Malagasy resources if any of you PCVs or RPCVs have scanned material.

P.S. Because you cannot talk about online Malagasy without mentioning another site. I hope you all already know about the Malagasy World Dictionary because it is an incredible resource as well.

Of rice and timber

We were invited into the living room of the President of the fokontany, or municipality, where we would spent the next few days before heading back to our house in Maroantsetra. After two weeks spent visiting three villages in order to try to understand a bit about the diversity of livelihoods and forest management and use surrounding the newest and largest of Madagascar’s Natural Parks, this introduction to our fourth stop of the trip was notable. First of all, the fact that it had a living room was notable. The house itself, though larger than others we had visited, was not unlike the houses of the wealthier residents of various villages. It was made from hardwood from the forest surrounding the village,rather than raffia or bamboo, with a corrugated metal roof brought up river 6 hours by canoe from Maroantsetra, the main port and city in this corner of the island. We sat on furniture made of precious hardwood, the first sofas we encountered. In the corner stood two 2m long forestry saws and in the back room were goony sacks filled with unhulled rice, from the last crop to be harvested. Aside from farming, which is nearly everybody's first occupation, the president also works construction, building houses for residents of the town, buying his wood from residents who harvest it from the forest they have rights to, passed down through the last 2 or 3 generations or newly acquired.

The second set of sofas we saw were at the house of the man who owns the machine that hulls the rice. Most people in the surrounding area, and throughout much of Madagascar rely of large mortar and pestles to hull their rice little by little and sell what they can in the hulled form. In this town, though it costs a bit to use, people have access to a hulling machine, run on a generator with diesel brought up river again by canoe. In return for 50 ariary (2.5 cents), they receive rice that is fit for consumption and ready to be rebagged and either eaten or shipped back down on the canoes to Maroantsetra where it fetches about 400 ariary more per kilo than the unhulled rice.

The one person we met that didn’t see himself as a farmer first was the school teacher of this town. He had grown up in the area and had returned to teach there after studying. His wife runs a store in the front of their house to provide the necessities for everyday life in the village. In addition to the teaching and selling incomes, he also works as a carpenter, buying planks and rounds of hardwood trees from local loggers to fill his commissions for beds, chests and yes, sofas.

Ambodihazomami is well endowed with rice paddies and only recently have they began also cultivating the slopes surrounding the village.

The above anecdote illustrates a number of aspects of the political economy of rural life here. A utilization of the forest for both commercial and subsistence purposes that is fueling both a local market for luxury goods and a transformation of agricultural technology that is allowing for export to the administrative hub. As apparent in the above photo, this town is surrounded by a significant amount of rice paddy. It was interesting to talk with folks about the changes in land use over time. I was told that up until about 20 years ago they had only planted rice one per year and that it sufficed. But as population has grown and inheritances of rice paddies being divided between the children has shrunk them, they moved to planting twice per year. As of three years ago or so, they began also farming rice on the hills, which requires cutting the trees and burning the soil. One of those that I talked to, who makes a living from timber, thinks that people should be trying to improve their techniques of paddy rice farming instead. And others worry that there just isn't enough land, and that the new protected area to their North will have to be used by the next generation.

This situation stands in contrast to the two other villages we visited during this mission, which had began working with the conservation NGO in charge of the protected area to create community managed conservation zones to act as a buffer. Neither of them had as much paddy land, being in narrower valleys. They both had extensive use of the hillside for rice farming such that the immediate slopes surrounding the villages were mostly cultivated rather than left as forest. In both villages they are no longer longer permitted to harvest timber for sale, and have to request permits to cut wood for their houses and to do agricultural clearings. In exchange, if they are diligent in their work, the conservation NGO provides development assistance in terms of latrines, metal roofs for schools, and nice, wood-paneled, metal roofed buildings for offices. There is some vanilla and cloves being grown and sold in all the villages but in a number of ways there seems to have been a basic trade off of timber for conservation in these two.

The hills around Andaparaty have been more heavily cultivated. The land in the foreground is newly returning to fallow.

At the end of our first mission, we have learned a great deal about the diversity of uses and economies related to land and the forest in this area. Eli, my field assistant, Gerandine, our camp steward, and I are spending the week caring for gear and doing data entry before heading out tomorrow for another few weeks of visiting villages. On the first mission we piloted household surveys to understand livelihoods strategies, perspectives on conservation and knowledge of forest use rules. We also talked to a number of community and conservation leaders to begin stratifying communities based of governance systems. On this next trip we will continue with that work while piloting forest use transects and vegetation plots. Next year then, when our survey effort really cranks up, we should be able to connect livelihood strategies and land use institutions to levels and types of forest use.

Hard evidence of 2000BCE settlement of Madagascar

Unfortunately, nobody yet seems to have picked up this story, and I'm in no position to do it justice, but it needs mentioning. The paper is behind a firewall so until somebody decides to to some science journalism on this (where's the press conference?), I guess you have to trust me.

Chert flakes from one of two sites in N. Madagascar. From Dewar et al. 2013.

While there has been some hints previously at pre-iron age settlement, this is the first unequivocal evidence. This rewrites Madagascar history.

The settling and subsequent ecological transformations (levels of deforestation, causes of holocene defaunation) of Madagascar have long been contentious and murky issues, it has been received wisdom for decades that Madagascar was settled not earlier than 500 CE. and that the first settlers were most likely from Indo-polynesia.

Dewar and associates have just published a paper relating archaeological finds at two sites in the north, where they have found stone tools dating back to 2000 BCE.

"The stone tools from Ambohiposa and Lakaton’i Anja are unlike anything reported from Madagascar. The small assemblages were discovered in sites and contexts indicative of intermittent occupation by small groups engaged in foraging."

This is a huge find that calls into question perceptions of the destruction that humans have wrought on Madagascar since it was first colonized. This is big. If humans had been living on the island for 2500 years or more before large lemurs and birds began going extinct, then it wasn't simply a matter of humans showing up in Eden and wrecking paradise. Complex shifts in modes of production, climate and trade require further unraveling.

Robert E. Dewar, Chantal Radimilahy, Henry T. Wright, Zenobia Jacobs, Gwendolyn O. Kelly, and Francesco Berna. 2013. Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models. PNAS. published ahead of print July 15, 2013.

Child labor is rife in Madagascar

Just wanted to call attention to this gripping statistic published (apparently) by the International Labor Organization.

According to the Shanghai Daily, in an article about rates of child labor in the mining industry,

"The latest data published by the ILO bureau showed that 28 percent of children in Madagascar ranging from five years old to 17 are working."

I think the stat looks both startling and a bit fudgey - you aren't supposed to work before you are 18 but I bet that stat would be quite different if you looked at those less than 16 yrs. Nevertheless it is a major issue here. It is more than common to see kids in rice paddies, or acting as nannies for their siblings, fetching water and taking care of the house chores, especially young girls.

Child labor has long been a concern for those looking at demographics in the developing world. Madagascar has an incredibly high population growth rate of almost 3% (ranking in the 15 highest growth rates in the world) and 50% of the population is under 18 yrs of age, according to the UNFPA (which also highlights the issues of child marriage). Many economists would link this to the tradeoffs of having more hands to work fields and do chores (especially during times of labor shortage like when the rice fields need to be prepared and planted) versus the costs of feeding and educating them - a very rationalist view, to be sure. The more appealing education looks, the less kids people tend to have. And the more perceived opportunities are available for high school and college grads, the more people are willing to pay to educate their children. With few high schools and colleges in the country, even though school fees themselves are kept low, the costs of sending kids to live in a far off city are not to be scoffed at here.

High child marriage and lack of opportunity (both for education and stable employment) equates to lots of kids who are forced to work - pretty much as simple as that. Of course, there are all sorts of complex cultural and global geo-political reasons why these issues continue to persist.

So though I am certainly no expert on the issue, I find myself drawn time and again, through my concerns with conservation and livelihood, to the issue of child labor. Just another example of how intertwined our social and environmental concerns are.

Anyone have more info on this?

Locust Plague in Madagascar Continues Unaverted.

First off, Happy Independence Day! 53 Years since Madagascar achieved independence from France in 1960. To celebrate on this blog I want to call your attention to an underreported and critically underfunded crisis that is happening here right now.

I'd always imagined a locust plague, have never witnessed one, to be a huge cloud of millions of locusts that fly through an area eating their way before moving on and soon dying. Crop lost but that's it. Unfortunately, that isn't how these things work at all. Well, you can get the cloud, and it could be up to a hundred miles long, but if the plague isn't fought, if the locusts aren't stopped, they just keep breeding and multiplying and each year the plague continues. It doesn't just end.

Madagascar has been swarmed with locusts since early this year. In fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has been issuing warnings since August 2012. They have been trying to raise funds to be able to monitor and eradicate the insects but unfortunately got nowhere near the $11 million they required then.

The swarm has now grown to plague proportions.  According to a recent FAO mission "in parts of the country rice and maize losses due to the locusts vary from 40 to 70 percent of the crop, with 100 percent losses on certain plots." About two thirds of the island is affected, over half its population, and mostly poor subsistence farmers who have no fallback form the loss of their rice harvest. Given a still intransigent strongman in power and political and economic isolation, this problem can't be solved with market substitutes either.

At least today I can say that  Bloomberg and some other international media are finally picking up the story, because the window on keeping this from being a protracted, multi-year devastating tragedy beyond what it already is is closing. "“If we don’t act now, the plague could last years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said. “This could very well be a last window of opportunity to avert an extended crisis.”"

Is the international community going to come to the aid of those in need here, or just go on pretending Madagascar is an uninhabited island filled with talking cartoon animals?

Dispatches from the Great Island - Take 5

Just a quick post to re-boot this blog.

I arrived in Tana a couple days ago. I will be in Madagascar through August. One more summer to get to know this island (well, as the last two nights reminded me as I was trying to find more blankets - it's winter here)! While I am settling in and waiting for my bags to arrive (hopefully they are two days behind me...) I realized that there is plenty of interest going on that should have been utilizing this space for.

View from my balcony at Niaouly Hotel overlooking the East end of Avenue de l'Independence

Over the last year, I've been settling into a PhD program at Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. During that time I finished up my thesis from Wisconsin and have been a co-author on two papers that stemmed from work around Ankeniheny-Zahamena. Id like to let you all know what that was about, but for an introduction to the field work that was involved, you can see this post. Hopefully, those posts will be able to function as a wonderful epilogue in lieu of the second chapter that never materialized.

I have begun work on a new project that will be in Maroantsetra. You can check out Dr. Chris Golden's website for tons of information about the area and the work that he has conducted there. I'll be collaborating with him and his team to expand efforts to take a deeper look at forest management institutions and access to forest resources.

I made a quick trip there in January with a couple of faculty members. Ill try to update briefly on my initial impressions from this first trip. I will be looking at issues of access to land and forest resources as they relate to conservation, people's livelihoods, and health outcomes. Ill try to provide some real-time impressions of what some of the points of contention are around Makira Natural Park. You can bet that the REDD funding mentioned in that article is going to be one, but I'll be very interested in what local people think on all things forest and farming.

Madagascar's political crises continues - it's high time to get caught up on some links. For a start, you should definitely be aware of the financial consequences, as presented by the World Bank.

That should take us through the summer. If there is anything in particular you'd like to see here, let me know.

Recent news stories from Madagascar...that aren't about the movie

After a few weeks of my Madagascar news alerts being dominated by Madagascar 3 box office reports, there were actually a few relevant updates this week about conservation and other developments that have to do with the real island, people, and biota. Amazing.

Here is a blog from the New Internationalist that bemoans just this and catches all of us up on the recent political history that has been blotted from our minds by cartoon zoo animals.

Centre Valbio, long an active force for conservation efforts and ecological science in Madagascar, has finally opened its research center. This will ensure that Ranomafana continues to be the research hub on the island, and will ensure that international collaboration continues to be fruitful, though I worry that it will keep attention focussed on a very well studied area that isn't necessarily emblematic of the rest of the island. For example, huge amounts of tourism dollars flow to Ranomafana, but how well can conservation efforts there be transfered to other parts of the island that are far of tourist's maps?  This blog from Scientific American has the story.

Along these same lines, International collaboration will be even easier, as the country has launched an online research network that, according to the Science and Developmnet Network, "aims to boost science, technology and education in the country, as well as internationalise its science."

Madagascar recently signed an Economic Protection Agreement with the European Union. Under the agreement, Madagascar, along with several other nations will have reduced tarriff access to European markets. This would be awesome if it had happened before Madagascar lost a similar deal, AGOA, with the US and had to shut its textile factories down already, and if it didn't force the developing countries to open their markets to European goods as well. The African Development bank is already warning Zimbabwe that this is a bad deal according to allAfrica and it looks similar for Madagascar to me.

While they are at it, they should probably renegotiate their fishing access fees, since the European Union has been exploiting them and paying far less now then they were 2 decades ago due to fixed fees, according to a new study in Marine Policy (Check out the PhysOrg write-up on it). Shout out to Blue Ventures for their contributions to this research. They are an RPCV-managed NGO garnering major accolades for their innovative marine conservation and community development work.

And we all know music and aid go well together. Well, Razia is at it again, pulling together a great lineup to tour the US and Canada to fight illegal logging in Madagascar. At a time when Nashville is pissed with the Fed's for targeting Fender's alleged use of illegal rosewood and ebony, Razia has garnered support from many big named acts to abide by the Lacey Act. She is tireless and if you are in Minneapolis, Madison, or New York, be sure to go. Anyone is SF want to come out with me in a couple weeks? Check out the schedule here, and enjoy the promo video below.

Corruption on high: Journalistic freedoms squashed to protect lucrative illegal logging

A disturbing series of stories have been coming out of Madagascar about the crack-down on journalists and the erosion of free press. This is ironic because, as a former DJ and television station owner, Rajoelina stirred dissent against the former government for just this sort of behavior. Only this time, it is for investigating illegal logging, which happens to have ties to this government.

Africa Review - Madagascar court orders radio station sealed off:

A court in Madagascar has ordered the sealing off of the main access road leading to a media house that aired a story on the illegal trafficking of precious woods allegedly by a billionaire chum of President Andry Rajoelina.

Not only are they arresting journalists and shutting down stations, they are also going after the investigators themselves, having fired the Environment and Forest minister over the story:

The sacked man made headlines when he alleged at a press conference that a young billionaire, who is a close ally of President Andry Rajoelina, was behind the illegal trafficking of precious woods in Madagascar.

Even this article has to suppress the name of the logger to not get thrown in jail....I recommend reading the whole, short piece.

This government, and Rajoelina himself have been tied to the illegal logging going back 2 years. Here is a video from 2 years ago of some investigatory work that was recently expanded for a BBC special called Lemurs and Spies (article about Rajoelina and logging here).



How can you do conservation work with so much corruption up to the highest leves possible? Seems like an impossible situation.

New sapphire rush underfoot - this time in sensitive rainforest

An article in the Telegraph sheds light on a rush to extract sapphires from the rainforest of Eastern Madagascar where I work.

This follows in the wake of substantial gold mining in the area in recent years. The mining has increasingly become a problem in the absence of state enforcement and as local management groups are fighting to gain control over their forests. When I was there last July, I frequently heard the refrain that the law protects what's above the soil but not what's under it.

Artisanal gold-mining pits are rather small and though they may extend in a network over a square kilometer or more, the damage is far more localized than much larger open pit, organized sapphire mining. Photo © Sara Tolliver 2011

Many local people were turning to mining to make a living because they didn't see any other alternatives. It is perceived as a way out of poverty despite the fact that many toil severely without finding enough gold to make it worth their while.

Sowing justice in the most fertile soils of California’s East Bay

How did you celebrate Earth Day? Did you actively reclaim the last five acres of the most fertile soils in your metropolitan area to utilize it for an agro-ecological demonstration farm for and by the people in the face of a state-corporate partnership to develop it to be able to sell luxury food to the wealthy? No? Well these folks did.

Rallyers marched through North Berkeley and Albany energizing the community around farming and food soveriegnty

I think a lot about food security in Madagascar. About the role of hunting in peoples’ livelihoods; about the different forms that sustainable intensification of rice and other crops can take in order to diminish the necessity to cut the forest for hillside rice; about the benefits the forest provides in terms of soil fertility, water retention, flood mitigation and a safety net to provide resources in the lean months.

But what about here at home? The talk i'm hearing is less around food security and more about food sovereignty. Much of the large tracts of agricultural land in the U.S. has been sucked up by corporate agri-business to plant mono-crops to feed industrial food systems that American consumers are then dependent on for subsistence. Food sovereignty is the idea that we need not be yoked to this system for our right to food, that we can democratically govern our own food systems. A working definition might be the ability of a community to control where its food comes from. Farmer's markets, small family farms, farmland protection, and Community supported agriculture (CSAs) are all essential elements of food sovereignty. Growing Power, out in Milwaukee, WI is showing us one way that communities, can come together to utilize small urban plots to intensively grow quality food where before little was present, and how effective this can be in. The occupy movement is engendering a more radically democratic vision for what food sovereignty can mean. It will be exciting to watch, participate in and learn from this emerging experiment. Raj Patel does a great job making this link over on his blog

Inspired by the Occupy movement, which has built widespread moral support for providing with those who were previously denied – the 99%, East Bay activists held an Earth Day rally and marched to the Gill Tract, in Albany, a piece of experimental farming land owned by UC Berkeley, who has been planning development activities on the land to fill budget shortfalls.  The rhetoric at the rally and march, as well as the organizational structure of the fledgling farm are straight out of Occupy – food for the people, daily community meetings, decentralized management. They are showing us that democracy extends to all our systems and people can take back that which is so primary in our lives: food and the cultural and ecological systems that we derive it from.

The activists are asking the University to protect the land under a permanent agricultural easement. At only 5 acres, if the farm is operated as a CSA it could only support about 250 families, but it could serve thousands as an educational hub for how to run a democratic farm, and millions as a symbol of democracy in action and the principles of food sovereignty.

First acre cleared and planted - at least 4 more to go!

Go to the movements website to see whats happening out at the Gill tract and for opportunities to get involved and support the effort. You can also find them on twitter at @occupyfarm and #occupythefarm. Better yet, head on down and get your hands in the dirt. They have only planted about 1 acre so far and could definitely use more hands.

Info and literature tables are present,  as well as food
and medical stations

Whether Madagascar or the USA, we all have a right to food and should create and maintain the sustainable agro-ecological systems that provide it. In Madagascar, food sovereignty is almost a given since it is mostly subsistence farmers disconnected from the global market, yet food security remains a major concern. Both here and there, though, visions trend toward the same solutions: diverse, democratic institutions to maintain social and ecological resilience amidst rapid global changes.

How should we prioritize conservation action globally?

Warning: technical material ahead...

Driven by the agreement set by the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity to “significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 (Jones et a 2011),” conservation prioritization became a hot topic. In light of recent indications that the rate of biodiversity loss has not declined and pressure on areas of high diversity has increased (Butchart et al. 2010), this continues to be a pressing issue. Here I review a piece from 2006 by Brooks et al. entitled "Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities" which tries to sort out the most effective way of prioritizing conservation ahead of the 2010 assessment, and apply the lessons to what we see in Madagascar today.

Brooks et al (2006) looked at prioritization schemes set by major conservation NGOs and classified them based on axes of irreplaceability and vulnerability. Irreplaceability is usually indicated by levels of endemism, but can include taxonomic uniqueness  and rarity of habitat types but these are hard to quantify. Richness is not of primary concern because “species richness is driven by common, widespread species; thus, strategies focused on species richness tend to miss exactly those features most in need of conservation (Brooks et al 2010).” Vulnerability is not clearly defined here but is a temporal indicator of threat. The most commonly used indicators are proportional habitat loss and protected area coverage. The authors bemoan the lack of consideration of demographic change, pressure from hunting, governance and institutional weaknesses and (which I found hugely surprising that it wasn't present) cost.

There is also a spatial component to these schemes and they all use overlapping “ecoregions” to define funding rather than a grid-based system. This has substantial effects on prioritization and the authors suggest normalizing these ecoregions because they are biased towards larger ones. Grid-based methods, however, like that used by Kremen et al (2008) to prioritize nationally in Madagascar, should supersede this concern.

By mapping the 9 most common prioritization schemes the authors were able to find high overlap within two groups of strategies, proactive and reactive, but not across them. Both proactive and reactive strategies prioritize high irreplaceability but reactive strategies also prioritize those with high vulnerability because these are the sites where action is most urgently needed while the proactive strategies prioritize low vulnerability because this is where conservation is most easily done(less politically charged and often cheaper).

The authors judge the success of the prioritization based on how much of the flexible funding available for conservation it was able to capture – the wrong measure. Shouldn’t we judge success on conservation outcomes? If we are going to focus on finances we should be looking at cost-effectiveness, which isn't included at all here, rather than funds captured. This data is becoming more readily available and will be a factor of future prioritizations so as that data is incorporated, this is likely to change. There are also political reasons why this is the wrong measure – CI appears to be moving away from the Hot Spot approach (or so says Kareiva, the head of The Nature Conservancy), lauded here for garnering the largest share of the pie, and turning to a people-centered ecosystem service approach to prioritizing funding. If the "success" of these priorities are so transient they are not useful in making future prioritizations. 

Most of Madagascar, especially the highly diverse moist forests, is prioritized by most of the reactive schemes, while the dry deciduous forests of the west are also prioritized under proactive schemes that look for areas of low threat. The overlap here demonstrates the need to more deeply investigate the level of vulnerability of this ecosystem.

Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena (CAZ) illuminates some of the complexity of prioritization. Madagascar itself was identified under the Hot Spot approach by Conservation International, a reactive scheme, but the particular site, an approximately 400,000ha area of contiguous forest, was selected based on irreplaceability and low vulnerability (ie it was an easy area to protect because of low human populations in the forest interior). Now, an ecosystem-service narrative, rather than a biodiversity one drives continued funding and discourse around CAZ. This shows the differences of scale and discourse in prioritization, which aren’t captured by an assessment of global schemes.

While there may be overlap between biodiversity priorities and ecosystem service priorities in terms of carbon and water quality, they by no means must overlap and we need to be clear about what it is that we are prioritizing. As of now, while we are shifting toward a commodity view of how to protect areas, there is far too often a lack of clarity. In fact, we still don’t have a strong understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and specific ecosystem services. This muddiness and ambiguity is yearning for clarity.

Citations

Brooks, T. M., Mittermeier, R. A., da Fonseca, G. A. B., Gerlach, J., Hoffmann, M., Lamoreux, J. F., Mittermeier, C. G., et al. (2006). Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities. Science, 313(7 July 2006), 58-61.

Butchart, S. H. M., Walpole, M., Collen, B., van Strien, A., Scharlemann, J. P. W., Almond, R. E. a, Baillie, J. E. M., et al. (2010). Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines. Science (New York, N.Y.), 328(5982), 1164-8. doi:10.1126/science.1187512

Jones, J. P. G., Collen, B., Atkinson, G., Baxter, P. W. J., Bubb, P., Illian, J. B., Katzner, T. E., et al. (2011). The why, what, and how of global biodiversity indicators beyond the 2010 target. Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 25(3), 450-7. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01605.x

Kremen, C., Cameron, A., Moilanen, A., Phillips, S. J., Thomas, C. D., Beentje, H., Dransfield, J., et al. (2008). Aligning Conservation Priorities Across Taxa in Madagascar with High-Resolution Planning Tools. Science, 320(222), 222-226. doi:10.1126/science.1155193

Has anything happened in Madagascar the last 6 months?

Re-revving the bloggin engine.


Here are a list of links that focus on Madagascar and/or conservation that I was considering reacting more fully to over the last 6 months. Oldest first.

New research agenda for Africa’s dry forests defined at Durban - CIFOR
Back in December, in conjunction with COP17 in Durban, a 1 dy conference was held to discuss dryland forest. Despite covering much of the African continent, this ecosystem has been largely ignored by carbon politics because it is far less densely forested than humid forests. It also happens to support more than half the population of the continent. This piece highlights the take homes from the conference, dryland forest value and some of the challenges.

Madagascar squares up to 'extreme' climate vulnerability - AlertNet
Also at Durban, there was discussion of the vulnerability of Madagascar to climate change. "Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranks Madagascar third for “extreme” climate risk in the world, behind only Bangladesh and India, Rakotoarisoa said." FOlks are working on rice intensification through low-till processess and flood and drought resistant seeds. THey have also been developing early-warning systems for cyclones, which became very necessary as two major cyclones hit Madagascar in the months after this report.

Madagascar’s Lemurs, Sacred No More - NYTimes
There was a flurry of coverage in the wake of a couple of papers that came out around hunting and taboos in Madagascar. One of the things things that Jenkins et al (2011) noted was that as traditional taboos were changing (due to migration and religious transitions amongst others) that endangered lemurs were becoming more culturally acceptable to hunt. This work was done very close to and found far higher rates of bushmeat consumption than we did.

Caution urged in sale of Madagascar's illegal timber stockpiles - Mongabay
In light of the recent announcement that Gabon is set to burn its ivory stockpiles, this February discussion of how to deal with Madagascar's illegally harvested precious hardwood's gains some poignancy. "Done right, funds from selling timber at auction could go toward forest protection and poverty alleviation efforts. Done wrong, sales of confiscated timber could enrich traffickers, boost demand for Madagascar's rare hardwoods, and spur new logging."
Help Madagascar Silk Weavers Share Their Experiences and Work Towards Sustainability - Hurry Boy It's Waiting There For You
Intrepid blogger and Madagascar RPCV Chris Planicka shares a story about the silk weavers of Madagascar and their (still current) efforts to get the cash they need to build markets in the US for their amazing scarves and hats. This effort is being innovated upon by NGOs in the north of the island in their attempt to find sustainable incomes for folks living next to and within new protected areas. The PCV -partnered project that Chris talks about seems to have better footing to me.

Indonesian 'Eves' colonised Madagascar 1,200 years ago - PhysOrg

A recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society determined from genetic analysis that about 30 women (plus men, potentially) settled Madagascar from Indo-Polynesia about 1200 years ago. Women weren't found on trading vessels so the question is open as to how they came to arrive in Madagascar...

Species Hitched Ride to Madagascar on Floating Islands - Live Science

Madagascar has been seperated from the mainland for 80 million years and the species on the isalnd radiated after that time. So how did they get there? By comparing the times and locations that current species on the island would have separated from their nearest neighbors, Karen Samonds from the University of Queensland, Australia says we can conclude that it must have been on large rafts of vegetation floating across the Mozambique channel. "For example," she says, "DNA evidence indicates that just one primate species made it across, probably 40 or 50 million years ago, and that ancestral form gave rise to the 101 descendent species you can find in Madagascar today."

and finally...

Learning on the Road to Nowhere in Madagascar - NYTimes Scientists at Work Blog

An entomologist who has worked for years in Madagascar tries to reach a largely pristine forest in one of the remotest corners of the island during the peak of rainy season. What can go wrong. This exciting post shows how adventurous (and maybe a bit crazy) we have to be to love doing this kind of work.

Gibson and CITES: Attention finally being paid to Madagascar?

If you know anything about socio-ecological issues in Madagascar, you know that exploitation of precious timber, especially rosewood, ebony, and polysandre, has been especially egregious since the 2009 coup d'etat. Even if you don't know anything about Madagascar, you might have heard recently of the ramifications of this through your rabid devourment of American political news. US Fish and Wildlife Service investigations of Gibson guitar have become a battleground between tea-party activists who think the government is over-regulating and environmentalists who see corporate greed ravishing the forests of impoverished nations like Madagascar. Here's a link to a fairly comprehensive article about the case from the Tennessean, published in the home state of Gibson Guitars.

The Myth of the Virgin Forest

A new meta-analysis of 138 studies across the tropics was published in the online edition of Nature a few days ago and found that, “primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining biodiversity.”

I was drawn to this article because it has been picked up by the popular media. This piece is already being wielded to call from stronger protection of these forests. In interview, one of the first authors does just this. Luke Gibson tells us, “It is therefore essential to limit the reach of humans and to preserve the world’s remaining old-growth rainforests while they still exist. The future of tropical biodiversity depends on it.”

What interests me is that it is never clear what forests they are talking about. Part of the problem is that the language is loose. Are “primary” and “old-growth” the same thing? Gibson seems to imply so.

In a quick google search of the sources publishing about this article, nearly every one on the first page uses a different epithet for these forests. From the first 6 headlines we get: “Virgin forests,” “natural forests,” “old growth forests,” “primary forests,” “pristine forests,” and “rainforest.” All of these names seem to conjure an idea of an untouched forest far from humans where nature can thrive free from the negative effects of our species. They all embody the wilderness myth.

To further highlight this let’s see what kind of land this pristine forest is contrasted against. “Degraded forests,” “disturbed forests” and “a re-modeled home,” and one piece from The Conversation tells us, “We live in an age of vanishing rainforests.”

This is the conservation myth.

Anatomy of an Expedition. Part One.

In August, two fellow grad students from UW-Madison came out to Madagascar to conduct fieldwork for a project to document the critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur, Prolemur simus, using trail cameras, and to gather interview data related to forest use and specifically the culture of hunting. They stayed for 2 weeks. Here is a log of our expedition (a word I do so love to use).

August 4

I picked up Erik and Britt at the airport a bit after midnight. We headed back to the hotel to have a preliminary meeting with a preliminary THB (Three Horses Beer, the national beer of Madagascar), and to catch up and revel in the excitement of the impending expedition, before catching a few hours of zzzs.

Erik and Britt still bleary-eyed from two days travel in the down-stairs part of our little loft at Sakamanga

Toaka Gasy!

Just got back from an amazing two week expedition with colleagues from the CHANGE program at UW-Madison to find the critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur and to investigate the effects of hunting on this and other species in the region around my research area. Next time I will post an anatomy of the expedition, as a sort of digital field journal.

But, as there is nothing better than a cold beer to soothe the physical and mental exhaustion after such an endeavor  I thought it would be appropriate to share short photo essay on toaka gasy, Malagasy moonshine, before heading back out for another 10 day field trip. Not that it is anywhere near as refreshing as beer...

Agroforestry Conundrums: Vanilla vs. Camphor

A recent series of posts (Well, back in May, but still…) by Noah Jackson, over at Rainforest Alliance’s Frog Blog, focused on vanilla farming in Madagascar. He is an auditor for RA, travels the world meeting farmers and foresters, assessing the sustainability of their practices and compliance with certification standards. He makes the point about how important it is for vanilla farming to be sustainable. Especially in Madagascar:

Vanilla grows in the northern part of the country, where coastal and montane rainforests thrive. In a place as biodiverse as Madagascar, growing and cultivating crops like vanilla in harmony with nature is particularly important –  irresponsible farming could threaten the integrity of this incredible landscape.

But if its like most of the crops in Mada very little is certified because of how expensive it is to do the audits and stay up to date with the latest requirements. There are, however,  folks  trying still export crops the right way. People like From the Field Trading, composed primarily of 2 rpcvs and the farmers that they have lived and worked with for years. 

My (not so) Nightmare Third World Dentist Experience

I got off the taxibe 165 as if I was going to The Cookie Shop, a little cafe in the capital that is the closest thing you can get to America this side of Africa. Unfortunately, as soon as I neared the shop, I had to ignore the little latte fiend in my brain and turn down a side road instead. This road heads past a strip of chop shops that leads to an informal market surrounding the “stinky lake,” the most foul, putrescent cesspool of a pond in Tana (and people fish in it). I did this because I was headed to the dentist, having ejected a filling from a lower incisor and subsequently swallowing it while therapeutically biting my nails the week before. I think I should take up smoking instead - it would be better for my teeth.

Searching for freshwater fish in Mada - what it can say about forest conservation

In a new blog post from the field for The New York Times, John Sparks describes his search for an incredibly rare and recently discovered species (1990s) of Damba, a genus of fish endemic to Madagascar.

He highlights the plight of freshwater fish on the red island: 

“It should be painfully obvious to the reader from my earlier posts that Madagascar’s native freshwater fishes are in very serious trouble — narrow endemism and widespread habitat degradation are a dangerous combination. Throw in competition with an array of exotic species, and you have the ingredients for a full-blown disaster. Essentially, freshwater fishes are afforded little protection within the isolated patches of protected forest that remain throughout the country, and within which one can still find relatively healthy populations of lemurs, chameleons and other native vertebrates. Most of these forest reserves are at higher elevation, where there is little suitable habitat for fishes other than rheophilic gobioids (gobies and eleotrids). In addition, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a watershed that has not been affected to some degree by deforestation throughout its course — and obviously, the negative effects of siltation persist downstream to the sea.”

But its not just fish that are threatened in freshwater systems: The lac alaotran lemur is critically endangered and the Alaotra grebe has recently been declared extinct.

One thing in his post that intrigued me is his emphasis on tilapia and their importance to local livelihoods:

....And the Wheel Turns: A year in review

Well... I’m back! Both to Madagascar and to this digital weblog of my exploits. As I continue my protracted transition from Peace Corps volunteer to academic / conservation professional I am reevaluating the purpose of this blog and its potential (more on that in a future post), I realize many of you may not quite know what I’ve been up to. That may be exacerbated by the fact of my signing off of here so abruptly and then disappearing from normal human reality into my own personal malarially-feverish year of grad school. So in lieu of the malagasy folk-tale about how the gecko got its spots (also in a future post, you better believe), I’ll just do a quick picture post of some of the highlights of my last year to get us all back up to speed. Then i’ll be free to focus on Madagascar and conservation.

After touring the North of the island with a bunch of amazing friends, going to places like this...

...and this...

...and then my 6 months were up and it was time to come on back to Fremont for a couple