<
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-decades-plantation-agriculture-coconut-palms.html>
'Coconut palms are king throughout the tropics, serving as the foundation for
human lives and cultures across the Pacific Ocean for centuries. However, 200
years of planting by colonial interests transformed the palm from the revered
"Tree of Life" to a cash crop monoculture grown on Pacific atolls for a
singular purpose—production of coconut oil (copra) for export around the world.
Despite wide interest in the global footprint of palm crops, the distribution
of coconut palms across tropical Pacific atolls has received little attention
until now. Published in
Environmental Research Letters, research from UC
Santa Barbara and The Nature Conservancy provides the first comprehensive map
of the vast footprint of coconut palm agriculture across nearly every Pacific
atoll.
"Coconut oil used to be essential to atoll economies, but today most coconut
palm plantations are abandoned and overgrown," said lead author Michael
Burnett, a doctoral student in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution, and
Marine Biology. "With the growing climate threats facing Pacific atolls, it's
critical to figure out where these abandoned plantations are using up critical
land and water resources, and where there may be opportunities to restore the
native forests to the benefit of islands and islanders."
Coconut palms now represent over half of the tree cover on these low islands,
confining formerly widespread native broadleaf trees to small fractions of
their natural range.
"That's a problem," Burnett said, "because replacement of broadleaf forests
with coconut monocrops has been linked to groundwater depletion, declining
seabird populations, and adverse impacts on adjacent coral reefs. Understanding
the present extent of coconut plantations is crucial for confronting
sustainability challenges facing communities across the Pacific's 266 atolls."
This loss of unique ecosystems on Pacific atolls is staggering. It even exceeds
the rate of deforestation due to oil palm production, at least in relative
terms, in other parts of the world. For instance, 10.8% of Borneo's land area
had been converted to oil palm monocrops by 2015. Meanwhile, coconut palms
presently cover 58.3% of the mapped atolls' total forested area and 24.1% of
their total land area.
What's more, 51.2% of these coconut canopies occur in monocultures indicative
of plantation agriculture and drastic ecological changes. Despite the
abandonment of many plantations in recent decades, the authors found that
coconut palms still surpass native broadleaf trees in terms of canopy area.
Yet, forest conversion on Pacific atolls has scarcely received a fraction of
the scholarly attention devoted to mapping oil palm-driven forest conversion.'
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
