Film: Exploring Biodiversity of Haiti’s Grande Colline

Green Antilles posted a fascinating video from the Terra Incognita series that examines remote, poorly known, and largely unexplored regions of Haiti, where almost no forests are left. In this first installment, a large and virtually unknown mountain range, the Chaîne de la Grande Colline, is revealed. The mountain is located near Port-à-Piment, on the Tiburon Peninsula in Haiti. It ranks as the 10th highest mountain in the country. A team made up of biologists, photographers, a filmmaker and a journalist explore the biodiversity of the Grande Colline in a helicopter expedition.

The viewer follows the team as it explores very rare frogs and anoles. Although the focus of the documentary is on the ravages of deforestation, it leaves us with a degree of hope that, with concerted energy dedicated to protection, Haiti’s remaining cloud forests and the species that inhabit them will be able to survive.

This and other videos—such as “Haiti’s Unnatural Floods,” “Saving Haiti’s Frogs,” and “Cutting Haiti’s Forests”—are available on the Caribnature/Haiti (a nexus for Caribbean nature and conservation awareness) page. Caribnature aims to teach people about the natural history of the Caribbean islands and conservation issues through multimedia essays. Each essay tells a story through images and video, contributed mostly by professional photographers and videographers. According to their description, “The hope is that these essays will raise awareness of Caribbean biodiversity and conservation.” Partners in this project are the Audubon Society of Haiti, Conservation International, Birdlife International, and the International League of Conservation Photographers.

Caribnature is a non-profit site created and directed by scientist Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, in an effort to bring attention to the writing on the wall revealed by the dire ecological situation in Haiti and beyond. Hedges—who is one of the world’s foremost authorities on amphibians and reptiles—has led rescue missions in Haiti and other countries in the Caribbean to try to save threatened frogs and other species. He points out that “The decline of frogs in particular, because they are especially vulnerable, is a biological early-warning signal of a dangerously deteriorating environment, just as a dying canary is an early-warning sign of dangerously deteriorating air in a coal mine. When frogs start disappearing, other species will follow and the Haitian people will suffer, as well, from this environmental catastrophe.”

Source: http://repeatingislands.com/

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