Measuring Impact

Research that works for developing countries and Australia

 

Assessment, management and marketing of goods and services from cutover native forests in Papua New Guinea

Project ID:
FST/2004/061
Collaborating Countries:
Papua New Guinea
Project Locations
Commissioned Organisation:
University of Melbourne, Australia
Project Leader
Professor Rod Keenan
Phone: 03 5321 4124
Fax: 03 5321 4166
Email: rkeenan@unimelb.edu.au
Collaborating Institutions:
  • Village Development Trust, Papua New Guinea
  • Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute, Papua New Guinea
  • Australian National University, Australia
Project Budget:
$783,318
Project Duration:
01/05/2007 - 30/04/2010
ACIAR Research Program Manager
Dr Russell Haines
Project Overview

Forest resources are a major contributor to different sectors of the PNG economy. The log export industry alone contributed some Kina 200 million to the national economy in 2003, but its current level of harvesting is unsustainable and accessible primary forest is likely to be logged out in the next 15 years.

Properly managed, however, PNG's forest resources could continue to make a major, sustainable contribution to the PNG economy, while maintaining many of the qualities that PNG society values from its forests. ACIAR's forestry strategy for PNG, developed in collaboration with PNG colleagues, is designed to promote a positive vision for PNG forestry. This project, a key element of the strategy, aims to improve the contribution that PNG's secondary forests make to national and local economies by developing appropriate strategies for their management and marketing. Project outputs will complement broader work on marketing of PNG timber, under consideration by the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and others.

Project Progress Reports
Year One

Progress on the project has been excellent thanks to strong working relationships with PNG partner organisations; PNG Forest Research Institute (FRI) and Village Development Trust (VDT). Project scientists spent March in PNG collaborating with FRI and VDT, and a project workshop was conducted on the 13th and 14th March with 23 stakeholders involved in the management of, or deriving livelihoods from, cutover native forests in PNG. Several important outcomes flowed from the workshop; the neglect and ongoing degradation of cutover forest is largely due to poor knowledge of the goods and services that may be available; assessment of this resource is a priority and the goods and services (such as timber, carbon and biodiversity benefits) that are available need to be communicated to communities to ensure they make informed decisions, derive benefit from their resource, and to avoid further degradation.
Group exercises with stakeholders identified several priorities for future project work that would have the greatest impact on community livelihoods; forest assessment methods used by forest certification bodies are labour intensive, inefficient, and possibly biased; this could be ameliorated using a random cluster sampling approach; there are definite market prospects for minor timber species (that dominate cutover forest) when sold as certified product that could provide community revenue; cutover forest needs to be classified according to the products it may provide now and into the future and forest assessment using remote sensing and forest growth modelling based on Permanent Sample Plot (PSP) information is an obvious way forward.
To enable forest assessment work to proceed, project scientists spent time at FRI in Lae cleaning and collating PSP data collected between 1992 and 2008 into an Access database, thus improving the capacity to analyse and report on growth in cutover forest. Based on PSPs, growth model development is underway, and models are being developed for sustainability and scenario analysis at two scales of forest utilisation in PNG; stand models for large-scale utilisation at the forest concession scale and individual-tree models for small-scale utilisation at the community level. The tropical forests of PNG are structurally complex and highly diverse both in structure and the species they contain. Because individual trees in PSPs are spatially mapped, work is underway trying to extricate the spatial competitive processes governing tree growth. Understanding these processes in these rarely studied forests has high scientific currency, and several high impact publications are in preparation. Beyond scientific currency, models will facilitate accurate growth and yield modelling that can inform small-scale community level utilisation.
In consultation with project partner VDT areas for initial assessment work have been identified; the small to medium sized community operations of Sogi in Madang Province, and Yalu and Gabensis in the Morobe province. Baseline community information has been collected, and a suite of remotely sensed optical (LANDSAT 5, LANDSAT 7 ETM, and ASTER) and radar (JERS-1) data over the study areas has been acquired. The Forest Canopy Density Mapper (FCD) has been applied to optical data to classify cutover forest according to canopy density. Analysis of JERS-1 radar data has revealed that forest canopy backscatter is related to tree volume on PSPs. This work is ongoing, but preliminary work in the pilot region indicates the potential for a rapid and cost effective assessment method for cutover forest in PNG.
Forest certification bodies operating in PNG have been engaged, and project scientists participated in a 2 day workshop on forest certification held in Port Moresby on 11th and 12th of March. The benefits of certification in empowering landowners, improving livelihoods, preserving the natural environment, and facilitating sustainable development were demonstrated, and it is a priority that the forest assessment activities underway in this project inform and improve forest certification efforts in PNG.