The Great London [Search results for Ivory Coast] 

Researchers surveying for endangered primates in national parks and forest reserves of Ivory Coast found, to their surprise, that most of these protected areas had been turned into illegal cocoa farms, a new study reports.

The researchers surveyed 23 protected areas in the West African nation between 2010 and 2013 and found that about three-quarters of the land in them had been transformed into cocoa production.

The Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa beans, providing more than one-third of the world's supply. Cocoa is the main ingredient in chocolate.

"The world's demand for chocolate has been very hard on the endangered primates of Ivory Coast," said W. Scott McGraw, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.

McGraw said the original goal of this research was "just to do a census of the monkeys in these protected areas."

"But when we started walking through these areas we were just stunned by the scale of illegal cocoa production. It is now the major cause of deforestation in these parks," he said.

"There are parks in Ivory Coast with no forests and no primates, but a sea of cocoa plants."

For the study, McGraw and his co-authors, all of whom work for Ivory Coast research institutions, spent a total of 208 days walking transects through nationally protected areas, most in the central and southern regions of the country. In each area, they noted the amount of forest that had been cut down or degraded and how much of this was replaced by cocoa or other types of farms. They also recorded the presence of 16 primate species, including monkeys and chimpanzees.

The results, McGraw said, were "depressing."

Of the 23 protected areas, 16 of them had more than 65 percent of their forests degraded by farms, logging or other human disturbance. While a variety of agricultural products were grown illegally in the parks, cocoa constituted 93 percent of the total crops grown.

Overall, 20 of the areas had illegal cocoa plantations and approximately 74 percent of the total land in these areas was transformed into cocoa production.

Unauthorized villages have sprung up within these parks, with one housing nearly 30,000 people.

"I've been doing survey work in these parks for 20 years, and it wasn't nearly this bad when I started. This is a relatively recent development," McGraw said.

The impact on primates has been dramatic.

• Overall, 13 of the protected areas (57 percent) had lost their entire primate populations, while another five had lost half of their species.

• One species of monkey -- Miss Waldron's red colobus -- was not seen during this survey and has not officially been sighted since 1978. It is probably extinct.

• Two other monkeys -- the Roloway monkey and the White-naped mangabey -- were seen in only two reserves and are critically endangered, at least partially due to the habitat destruction caused by illegal cocoa farms.

"The Roloway monkey may be the next to go extinct," McGraw said. "It is not able to live in the degraded habitats that are left in many of these protected areas."

A variety of factors have led to these forest reserves being destroyed, he said. One has been the growing worldwide demand for chocolate. Ivory Coast produced a record 1.7 million metric tons of cocoa in the year that ended in September, according to the International Cocoa Organization in London.

Many of the older, legal cocoa plantations in the country have been blighted by disease or otherwise haven't produced at the same levels as previously, which has led some growers to establish new farms in the reserves. Moreover, migrants from outside the country have moved into Ivory Coast and turned to farming to survive.

At the same time, Ivory Coast has been in political turmoil in recent years and the government hasn't been focused on monitoring these forest reserves.

"There is little, if any, real active protection given to these parks and reserves," McGraw said. "People have moved in and settled with essentially no resistance, cut down the forest, and planted cocoa. It is incredibly blatant."

McGraw said that while the results are disappointing, there is still time to halt the disappearance of more primates and other wildlife. First, the land within protected areas needs to be actually protected.

Outside these lands, growers should move toward shade-cocoa farming, which keeps some of the large existing trees, with cocoa plants interspersed among them. This would at least preserve some suitable habitat for monkeys that live in the country, he said.

In addition, there should be efforts to connect the many fragmented forest reserves in the country. "We need to view the protected areas not as individual islands, but as a matrix," he said.

One promising development is the establishment of community-based bio-monitoring programs that involve foot patrols conducted by local villagers. McGraw said his co-authors on this paper established a patrol in the Dassioko Forest Reserve and it has succeeded in reducing illegal activity in the area. Encounter rates with primates has risen in the area as a result.

The study appears in the March 2015 issue of the journal Tropical Conservation Science.

Author: Jeff Grabmeier | Source: Ohio State University [March 30, 2015]

The wreck of a former slave ship lying just off the coast of Perth is being scoured by maritime archaeologists using new technology to revisit earlier excavations and help learn more about Australia's underwater past.

The site of the James Matthews is being photographed to create a detailed three-dimensional model of the shipwreck.

It is hoped the work will eventually help determine new ways of protecting it and other shipwrecks as well as ways to test new techniques and methods.

"The colours and details are really accurate," the WA Maritime Museum's Madeline McAllister said.

"Whereas in the past we would have taken some photos to create a 2D site plan and then also done the measurements ourselves with tapes, so [it was] not quite as accurate as what we're getting with these 3D models."

The James Matthews was first discovered in 1973 lying largely buried in sand in shallow waters two-to-three-metres-deep, less than 200 metres off Woodman Point, just south of Fremantle.

It had sunk there after slipping its anchor during a storm and hitting rocks in July 1841.

At the time, the snow brig was a merchant vessel, and had travelled from London laden with farm equipment and construction material for the newly established Swan River colony.

But archaeologists, who first excavated the ship in the 1970s led by former director of the WA Maritime Museum Graeme Henderson, soon discovered its link to the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade.

It had previously been called the Don Francisco and was owned by a notorious and powerful Brazilian-born slave trader called Francisco Felix de Souza, who operated out of West Africa and was involved in power plays with leaders of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present day Benin.

The Don Francisco was seized in 1837 off the island of Domenica as it headed towards Cuba by the British, who had passed an act abolishing the slave trade three decades earlier.

The British sailors found 433 slaves crammed inside the 24.5-metre hull.

The ship should have been destroyed under the law of the time, but was instead repaired and renamed the James Matthews, a London-registered merchant vessel — paving the way for its eventual demise.

When it was wrecked off Woodman Point, the ship fell on its side and buried much of its cargo and rigging in the sand.

That helped preserve the artefacts.

"In the case of the James Matthews, it went into sand and the sand buried it with the shifting currents and so forth, and so basically most of the ship was still there. Wonderful," Dr Henderson said.

"The sand gives them an anaerobic environment, which means no oxygen, which means not much in the way of deterioration had taken place.

A leather shoe, a parasol with much of the lace preserved, an ivory chess set, and pulleys with rope still largely intact, were some of the surprisingly well-conserved artefacts discovered.

Intriguingly, the part-owner of the ship at the time, Henry de Burgh, later wrote 200 gold sovereigns were also lost to the sea, supposedly never recovered.

Former WA Maritime Museum director Graeme Henderson, who has officially retired but still spends his days hunting shipwrecks, said the 3D modelling would help gain a better understanding of the site over time.

"The idea is we will come back very few years and take another set of photographs and be able to overlay the models," he said.

"And you'll see growth in seaweed and sponges on the site and you'll also be able to see the deterioration if that's happened."

WA Museum maritime archaeology curator Ross Anderson said a lot of underwater cultural heritage sites, including shipwrecks like the James Matthews and prehistoric sites, were "out of sight and out of mind".

"If people don't see them, they don't see the importance, so these kinds of visualisations and interpretations convey to people what's under there, what's under the water, what's under the sand, [and that it's] actually really important and worth preserving," Dr Anderson said.

Author: Nicolas Perpitch | Source: ABC News Website [December 11, 2016]