Work Areas
Resnatur has defined its lines of work for the fulfillment of the mission and Institutional objectives. These are organized in strategic areas, each one of them led by a Coordinator and additional support of consultants for the development of projects, technical research and other activities. The strategic work areas defined by Resnatur are the following:
- Conservation and Production
- Legislation and Policy
- Information Analysis and Monitoring
- Environmental Education
- Communications
Conservation and Production
Main objective
To promote, support and consolidate the initiatives of natural ecosystems management and sustainable production of the Natural Reserves in benefit of the Associates and of the community in general, through research, planning, sustainable management, qualification and assistance. The final goal is related to the biodiversity conservation, ensuring the permanence of the Associates in their Natural Reserves.
Natural Reserves Characterization
The characterization is the collection of the initial information on each Natural Reserve, in other words, a way to register and to systematize the actual state of this Reserve. This information includes aspects such as geographic, ecosystem, biological, social, economical and production data of the Reserve. There are various sources for this information such as data sent by the owner, in form of documents, titles and cartography. This information is first analyzed by Resnatur’s technical unit, for further enrichment with the contribution and observations of experts in the legal and information analysis areas.
The characterization expert, a well prepared person in the above subjects, visits the Natural Reserve, accompanied by the owner and experienced connoisseurs of the region. This visit can last one or several days, depending on the size and complexity of the Reserve and the region. During the visit observation routes are followed through the natural ecosystems, the productive systems, infrastructure zones and other surrounding areas.
The characterization expert keeps a detailed record of all these observations including any input of the Reserve owner and the connoisseurs of the region. This also includes any surveys on the fauna, the flora and the uses of the species in the region. It is important to include any additional aspects related to the regional biodiversity and the culture.
The characterization expert writes down all the information and observations in a field book, in order to transfer it into a data card and Resnatur’s database. This also includes cartography annotations of the area.
The characterization card is rarely completed on one first visit, and in many cases it is important to collect secondary information in some institutions like the coffee committees, the regional corporations, research institutes and universities. If there are known research documents or related work on the Reserve, it is always advisable to collect all these additional data, and annex it as reference information.
Finally, the first draft of the data card is returned to the Reserve owner for further review. The final reviewed information is entered into the data base, and will serve as baseline information for monitoring purposes, as well as a tool to develop a management plan for the Reserve.
A long term management plan and a zoning exercise of the Reserve will follow, which will be produced together with the owner and his or her family, with the support of experts in conservation, sustainable production systems and wild areas management.
Management Plan Formulation
This is a very useful tool to reach the conservation and sustainable production objectives. This plan becomes the guide for the necessary activities to reach these goals and to monitor any advance and effectiveness.
The good knowledge of the Reserve, including the relationships with the surrounding community and ecosystems, are a basic requirement to develop a management plan that really adjusts to the necessities of the area and its owner.
The characterization card and updated cartography are basic tools to generate a management plan of a Natural Reserve. This information can also be used to perform a zoning exercise of the Reserve for future development.
Each one of these zones will have defined objectives, the activities and necessary resources to reach those objectives, the people in charge of those activities, the dates or terms, and also success and sustainability indicators.
Resnatur applies a methodology for the elaboration of management plans of Natural Reserves of the Civil Society in Colombia, that consists of eight stages describing each one of the steps to fulfill to develop a successful plan.
For further information refer to Publications
Conservation and sustainable production systems
For us, the sustainable production and the conservation are in essence complementary activities. Production systems in order to be sustainable must promote landscape use strategies that go with local ecosystems recovery, and progressively improving their integrity.
The search for better complementary agricultural practices with the ecosystems integrity recovery constitutes the axis of the work that will guide the experiences in Sustainable Conservation and Production Systems.
We recognize the importance of respecting the ways of traditional customs (cultures and families), and also look for new skills in sustainable agricultural practices, that simultaneously contribute to the improvement of the ecosystem’s integrity.
The proposal is not to reconstruct pre-Columbian landscapes of little or null intervention. Sustainable agriculture includes the communities as natural inhabitants of the ecosystems, among other aspects.
We assume that our ecosystems have already experienced changes, in some cases very dramatic ones, and that these changes have modified the dynamic of the natural landscapes in a way that it is not possible to recover them to their original natural state.
These changes, (loss of the superficial horizon of the ground, change of the global humidity retention, alteration of the dynamic among living ground components, substantial modifications to the cycle and composition of the organic matter, important alterations of the ecological relations between the fauna and wild flora, etc.) represent a permanent research challenge.
The progressive knowledge of local ecosystems’ base function, including cultural components, will generate the local premises, for example in flora and fauna diversity, soil decomposers, insect population, seed dispersers, pollinators, ground cover percentage, among many others.
Our sustainable production systems will illustrate concrete complementing practices with these local ecosystems’ base function. Learning about our ecosystems requires patient observation of nature (nature reading), and that is our approach. Natural regrowth exhibits the best recovery capacity of any ecosystem and for that reason our proposal represents a request in favor of this practice.
The focus of our approach:
“To know the local ecosystems’ base function for the development of agriculture systems that progressively complement these operation bases”.
Hence our proposal that sustainable production is only possible with conservation criteria (ecosystem integrity).
The conservation and sustainable production proposal considers the following thematic units: water, soil, agriculture, animal production, energy, labor, Heirs, synergies and land planning.
For further information see: Publications – Conservation – production systems.
Biotrade
There are some subjects that are being worked on in Resnatur which are high-priority for the future of our conservation – production initiatives in the private sector.
In this work, the exploration of tools to improve the quality of life in the Natural Reserves and their areas of influence is relevant, and it is being supported by the World Wide Fund for the Nature (WWF Colombia) and its agreement with the Institute Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH). The agreement for Colombia involves the development of conditions and markets for products that fulfill requirements of environmental, economic and social sustainability, by means of Biotrade Initiative.
This it is a complex subject that it requires of a high degree of work and a lot of knowledge that makes success of a commercial initiative possible, either through a program such as Biotrade or through other schemes. There is no question that we must undertake activities that allow us to know our resources, obtain their quantification, qualification, characterization and allocation of attributes, to provide added value and to assure their quality.
Through the study of these subjects, we are positioning ourselves as valid actors of the production within the conservation-production model, in which we have advanced with solid steps. We have been constructing defined criteria for conservation and conservation-production, such as zoning and characterization of the territory and the resources, design of management plans, conservation and conservation-production concepts, as well as agro-ecological practices.
As a result, we obtained assets generated in the natural resources of the Reserves and in the qualified human resource, which assures and enriches them with its cultural and social definitions.
Our challenge now is to obtain economic results without losing the previous attributes. Consequently, we cannot forget that our productive systems are based on the varied production, the food security, and the socially and environmentally sustainable practices. Neither should we forget that the production areas in our Reserves are small or are associated to the forest, that we have abundant biodiversity and that we are located in diverse ecosystems throughout the country, each one of them with particular necessities.
The Biotrade initiative looks for access to global markets, under criteria of biodiversity resources conservation in southern countries. It is part of an environmentalist policy originated inside the UNCTAD in 1996. The Institute Alexander von Humboldt in Colombia is in charge of its development from year 1999.
Resnatur has approached the Biotrade subject from diagnoses of the present and potential production of Natural Reserves in Urabá, Nariño, Vitaco, Palmira and Amazonia. We have developed a hypothesis of common supply, analyzing the use given to the territory of the Reserves, and defined the type of products, based on the activity that generates them, everything within our schemes of conservation and/or conservation-production.
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