Guardian of Earth's treasure trove of trees
For 50 years, Britain's Peter Ashton has been studying – and trying to preserve – a wealth of diversity in Asia's tropical forests.
from the April 26, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Today, Ashton notes sadly, the areas of pristine Asian rainforest are almost exclusively restricted to legally protected parks and sanctuaries. If it isn't protected by law (and sometimes even when it is), it is cut down. Particularly vulnerable is the Dipterocarp family of trees (known collectively as red mahogany to most), which dominate the canopy of lowland Asian forests. These, Ashton notes, are the trees that have produced more than half the timber for global markets for the past couple of generations. "And, needless to say," he adds, "there aren't many left."
Ashton isn't against logging per se. But his life's work has been to understand how different trees in the rain forest perform so that humans can harvest them sensibly and sustainably, rather than just tearing them down and moving on.
"If you want to sustainably manage a forest for timber production, you have to know your trees: How fast they grow; what soils they grow on," he says. "The forest needs to be handled in different ways. It needs to be felled with different intensities and treated afterwards in different ways."
When he first stepped into a rain forest, in Brunei in March 1957, little was known about the trees that grew there. These forests thrum with diversity. "Species rich," scientists call them. Just how rich, Ashton was about to find out.
Ashton spent five years documenting trees for the Sultan of Brunei, disappearing into hostile terrain for weeks at a time. "It made my life, really," he says, shrugging self-deprecatingly. His peers are more generous. "To do what he did involved tremendous persistence but also physical toughness," says emeritus professor Peter Grubb of the University of Cambridge. "He goes into the forest and lives on nothing much for weeks on end."
But it was the academic, not the physical, challenge that initially bewildered Ashton. "There are around 35 native tree species in Britain, around 350 to 400 in the United States. In Brunei," which is less than half the size of Connecticut, "there are around 3,000. How do you manage 3,000 trees?"
Ashton aimed to find out. He set up small plots to establish which kinds of trees thrived where. He documented 30,000 trees from almost 1,000 species. He returned to write up his findings, teach at Aberdeen University in Scotland and at Harvard, and ponder how to set up something more ambitious.
What was needed, he resolved, was a broader regional or even global network of rain forest plots to provide truer measurements of how different trees perform. With collaborators like the now-eminent ecologist Stephen Hubbell and impressive funding from public and private sources, Ashton led the establishment of Forest Dynamics Plots, a global network that now includes 18 permanent plots of about 125 acres each, mostly in Asia, that provide data on almost 4 million trees.
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