Project to Restore Haiti Ecosystems Resumes

A rain gauge that provides an automatic electronic data log is installed near a Baptist church in Gavalier, Haiti in early April. It is one of four installed at different sites in the Port-à-Piment watershed, as part of the Haiti Regeneration Initiative project to restore Haiti's degraded ecosystems.

CIESIN and other EI researchers returned to Haiti recently to resume participation in the Haiti Regeneration Initiative (HRI), a project to design strategies to restore ecosystems in order to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters and to improve food security and livelihoods. Pilot activities begun in 2009 have been re-started following the disruptions of the January 12 earthquake. The HRI is a collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Earth Institute, the American University of Les Cayes, the University of Notre Dame in Torbec, and a number of local nongovernmental organizations.

Research is focused on the Port-á-Piment watershed in southwest Haiti. During the April mission, a local team of experts was trained in methodologies to implement a Land Degradation Surveillance Framework, which will map soil characteristics across the entire watershed. A set of four rain gauges was installed to monitor precipitation and, in later stages, to support hydrologic modeling and flood early warning. The HRI has also begun analyzing community organizations and resource management capacities with the objective of optimizing local participation and community-driven planning. These represent the initial stages of a long-term monitoring and data collection process to enable the various Haitian stakeholders to make informed decisions and management plans.

The field team was led by Marc Levy and Alex Fischer of CIESIN and included Wade McGillis of the Geochemistry Division of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Sabine Marx of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), Sean Smukler of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program, Lior Asaf of CIESIN, and Kiran Jayaram of CIESIN and the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4).