Haiti's first private nature reserve will protect 68 species of vertebrates | MNN - Mother Nature Network
Professor S. Blair Hedges from Temple University and Haitian businessman Philippe Bayard, CEO of Sunrise Airways and president of Société Audubon Haiti, began working together nine years ago in an effort to raise awareness about Haiti's loss of wildlife and wilderness. The Haitian government took notice of Hedges' and Bayard's efforts and declared Grand Bois a national park in 2015. Then, in November 2018, Hedges and his team identified Grand Bois, along with a few other locations, as a biodiversity hotspot in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They determined this by conducting helicopter surveys of Haiti's remaining forests.
The national park designation helped create some protections, but the Haitian government has limited resources to adequately keep the park safe. Hedges and Bayard sought private funding to secure more land and to help pay for park management. They found the GWC and Rainforest Trust as willing partners to further protect Grand Bois. "Sadly, conservation efforts in Haiti were not producing convincing results and therefore the current system of protected areas is not working. Something different was truly needed," Bayard says in a statement from Temple University. Following two years of instability in the government, the coalition managed to complete the land purchase Jan. 18.
The Grand Bois mountain is part of Haiti's Massif de la Hotte mountain range, a key conservation region in the country and one of the most important habitats for amphibians in the world. Over the course of seven years, Hedges and Bayard conducted two expeditions through Grand Bois and documented 68 individual vertebrate species, including 19 critically endangered amphibians.
These amphibians include the Tiburon stream frog (pictured above), which had gone unseen by researchers for 40 years. This frog is a "unique lost species," according to the GWC, that made an evolutionary reversal to aquatic living after its ancestors had adapted to a terrestrial forest life.