| [Back to front page] | Understanding Forest Environments Forest environments are complex. They comprise biophysical, social and economic components. If efforts to increase the productivity of forests, conserve diversity, improve livelihoods and develop informed policies are to succeed, these environments must first be better understood. CIFOR’s project on the ‘Conservation of Biodiversity and Genetic Resources’ seeks to understand the diversity of plants and animals in the forest. People living in the tropics who are dependent on forests are the guardians of forest diversity, and they often possess intimate knowledge and sophisticated management systems for the resource on which they rely so heavily. CIFOR believes that conservation of forest biodiversity will be most efficient if local skills and knowledge are incorporated and if forest-dependent communities receive economic benefits from agricultural and pharmaceutical developments resulting from use of biodiversity, or their knowledge of it. During 1997, research on genetic resources was extended to include broader issues of biodiversity. In tropical forests, reduced biodiversity causes losses in ecosystem stability and ultimately results in the destruction of tropical forest ecosystems. The consequences can be regional and global, affecting soil, hydrological cycles and climate, as well as limiting the opportunities for future breeding of forest stock. The interactions of ecosystem processes are being studied at two levels. One is the landscape-scale losses that can reduce biological diversity. The other level comprises the micro-scale processes, such as inbreeding, pollination and seed predation. This research aims to assess the impacts of human disturbance, logging and fragmentation on the in situ conservation of forest biodiversity and genetic resources, and to develop tools for measuring and monitoring biodiversity. These tools include molecular markers, computer software and GIS and remote sensing applications.
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