ARBIO Peru promotes analog forestry (AF) as a tool of ecological restoration in the Madre de Dios region.
Arbio Peru promotes analog forestry (AF) as a tool of ecological restoration in the Madre de Dios region. AF uses natural forests as guides to create ecologically stable and socioeconomically productive landscapes. This is a complex and holistic form of forestry, that reduces the use of external products, such as agrichemicals and fossil fuels, and attempts to replace them by strengthening ecological mechanisms to increase resilience and productivity. Since 2012 Arbio Peru has been a member of the International Analog Forestry Network (IAFN) and has developed joint research and training activities.
Analog forestry is based on the cooperation with small farmers and native communities to maintain and restore forests and, simultaneously, to improve their income and sustenance. Besides focusing on ecological sustainability, AF also recognizes the social and economic necessities of local rural communities, which can be met through the production of a diversity of marketable goods and services that range from foodstuffs to pharmaceuticals, and from fuel to forage.
Some important data:
- AF is a complex methodology of agroforestry, which provides a variety of products and reduces the producer’s risks as opposed to their dependency of the market of monocultures.
- AF diminishes the investment in external supplies, recovers and conserves the soil, is ideal to recover degraded areas, has a high potential for social impact, acts strategically in the adaptation and mitigation of climate change and variability and generates organic products required by a segment of the market in constant growth.
- We have developed a data base of 52 potential species, characterized by 17 economic, social and edaphobioclimatic variables for the creation of an AF model adapted to the conditions of Madre de Dios.
- We have an experimental restoration parcel that prioritizes Amazonian medicinal and fruit species. That is located at kilometer 4.5 of the Tambopata corridor in Puerto Maldonado (the “Chakramama”).
- Thorny Tatiana, general director of Arbio Peru, was certified in 2015 as a AF trainer and has carried out workshops in Peru, Paraguay and Central America.
- For further information see: http://www.analogforestry.org