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Spring 2008 Vol. VI, No. 3
The Green Issue
Saving the Cedars: The Tannourine Project
In 1996 an urgent campaign was launched
to save the Tannourine cedars from a mysterious blight that was devastating
Lebanon’s national treasure. Today it looks as if the evil beast has been
beaten.
“I was attending a conference in West Hall in 1996 when
Dr. Henriette Tohme, who was then a biologist at the
Lebanese University, walked up to me with a twig in her
hand. She explained that the twig was from one of many
cedar trees in Tannourine and asked me, ‘Why does it
look like this?’” recalls retired AUB Professor Nasri Kawar.
That meeting in West Hall was the beginning of a tenyear
mission to save, protect, and preserve the cedars of
Tannourine in north Lebanon that continues to this day.
Kawar—who recently retired after spending 45 years
at AUB as an FAFS professor of pesticides—has played
a central role in this project. He is widely respected for
his expertise in Lebanon’s cedars and is the person who
discovered the insect that attacked the Barrouk cedars
more than 30 years ago, in 1975. Even so, he remembers
being stunned by the appearance of the twig that Tohme
handed him. “It had a reddish coloration. I knew right
away that this was not a healthy twig. I also knew that
the coloration was not the result of the insect we had
discovered in Barrouk so many years earlier,” he says. His
curiosity piqued, he decided to travel to Tannourine that
weekend to see the damage for himself. Although he was
able to confirm that indeed something was devastating the
Tannourine cedars, he could not tell what it was. He could
tell, however, that if something were not done, more than
half the trees would die.
It was only after several trips over the period of a
year that Kawar and his colleagues—including one of his
former students Nabil Nemer—were able to observe the
larvae that was causing the infestation attacking more
than 70 percent of the Tannourine forest.
“It turns out that we needed to be there at precisely
the right time in the larvae life cycle to be able to
observe them,” says Kawar. Dr. Khuzama Knio, an
entomologist at AUB, was able to identify the larvae’s
family of sawflies. Specimens were then sent to Dr.
Henri Chauvin in France, a specialist in sawflies, who
described the new species of Cephalcia, and adopted the
name C. tannourinensis, by which the species was already
informally known.
Having identified the cause for the pest outbreak
that was devastating the Tannourine cedars, Kawar and
Nemer shifted their focus to pest management. Despite
the risks of using even “safe” insecticides, everyone
agreed that it was the only way to treat this problem.
Kawar remembers those days. “I told everyone jokingly
that if we don’t do something quickly, we would have to
replace the cedar on the Lebanese flag with this insect!”
While researchers at AUB were considering various
options, so too were the people who lived in Tannourine.
They contacted Dr. Guy Demolin, an entomologist
from the French National Institute for Agricultural
Research (INRA) in Paris. Demolin worked closely with
Nemer to select the best way to treat the pest outbreak.
After considering many options, they chose the insect
growth regulator diflubenzuron. Nemer explains that
diflubenzuron, which is an environmentally friendly
insecticide that is widely used to spray forests throughout
Europe and the United States, “works best in the early
larval stages of the insect and has a more or less good
adhesion to the needles of the trees due to its use with a
special kind of oil.”
The AUB-led team of scientists faced a number of challenges as they considered
ways to treat the pest outbreak including the presence of mines
in some parts of the forest that were left over from the
Lebanese civil war. Looking back, Nemer describes how he and his colleagues
“were working in the forest at our own risk” because no one knew exactly
where the mines were. Because of the presence of unexploded land mines
and the nature of the forest topography, they decided that aerial spraying
by helicopters that would be able to get down close to the trees would
be the most effective way to treat the cedars. Unfortunately, spraying
the forests would also be an expensive undertaking: the price tag for
three days of aerial spraying by a helicopter from a French company was
$100,000. After a sustained effort, the AUB team was able to convince
government officials to fund the first spraying of the Tannourine cedars
in 1999. They sprayed again in 2000 with funding provided by the Ministry
of Agriculture. In subsequent years, with support from the Lebanese Army,
they were able to spray a much larger area at considerably less cost.
Although the spraying was successful in stopping the attack, Kawar and
Nemer agreed that it was not a good long-term solution to the problem.
They noted that C. tannourinensis had already started to attack the nearby
cedars of Bcharreh. Because of the possible hazards to the forest ecosystem,
it was critical that they develop some other strategy for managing the
insect population than aerial spraying. Between 2001 and 2003 AUB worked
with the Ministry of Agriculture on a two-year FAO-funded project to develop
an integrated management plan for the pest infestation. Nemer, who has
been the point person “on the ground” in all efforts to save the Tannourine
cedars, worked closely with other AUB scientists to develop a methodology
to monitor the insect populations, organize training and workshops, and
develop outreach materials.
In recent years, Kawar and Nemer have led an even larger and more comprehensive
initiative—a $1.2 million project entitled Integrated Management of Cedar
Forests in Lebanon in Cooperation with Other Mediterranean Countries.
The project was funded by a grant from the Global Environment Facility-United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to the Lebanese Ministry of Environment
and implemented by AUB. President John Waterbury described the project
as a “wonderful example of hard core scientific research with a very high
pay-off in practical terms.”
The group of AUB-led scientists has identified the cause of the appearance
of C. tannourinensis in the Tannourine Forest, developed an action plan
for the integrated management of cedar forests in Lebanon and the region,
coordinated activities among scientists in Lebanon, Algeria, Cyprus, Morocco,
and Turkey to assess the risk of a future attack, and arranged for all
cedar forests in the region to be surveyed for C. tannourinensis and its
natural enemies. The project has also generated some enormously successful
outreach materials including an 18-minute DVD that has been shown to audiences
in Lebanon and other countries that participated in the project.
Throughout all these efforts, the team has worked closely with the people
who live and work in the region. “Our efforts to protect Lebanon’s cedars
will not succeed unless the local community is actively involved and has
a stake in these efforts,” Nemer says. “Although our priority is to protect
and preserve Lebanon’s cedars, we recognize that people need to make a
living.” In addition to being trained on invasive species control, forest
management, flora and fauna monitoring, and the use of GIS and GPS, members
of the community are also being helped to prepare traditional processed
foods that they can sell to visitors to the Tannourine Cedar Forest Nature
Reserve.
Although the $1.2 million project to save the Tannourine cedars ended
on December 31, 2007, AUB’s involvement with Lebanon’s cedars continues.
Nemer is currently involved in a $3 million project to support five of
Lebanon’s nature reserves in Al Shouf, Tannourine, Horsh Ehden, Bentael,
and Kfar Zabad. In addition to ongoing efforts to monitor the insect population,
particularly in the cedar forest stands in Al Shouf, Tannourine, and Horsh
Ehden, the project will tackle other biodiversity problems as well.
“Working on this project has taken over our lives at times, but it has
also been very rewarding,” says Kawar. He stresses that the effort would
not have succeeded without the coordinated and sustained involvement and
cooperation of scientists, funders, and policymakers in Lebanon and the
region, and, most importantly, the support of the people who live among
Lebanon’s cedars.
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