Wetlands Education at Bang Lang Da's Primary School

On Monday 8th we produced a tremendous schools event, in the primary school that Bang Lang Da village and Ban Talin Chan village share. Jim, Ning and Stephen from MAP were joined by myself and K' Donnapat from Wetlands International, as well as the education officer from the Dept for Marine and Coastal Resources, and both villages' conservation group leaders. After a brief opening speech by the leader of the Taesobahn (sub-district authority), K Donnapat got the talk going with the issues surrounding climate change. K' Donnapat is a natural with the children and seems to thrive off their energy. After a coffee break, the group of children was divided into three. One of these groups was lead by K' Ning of Mangrove Action Project. A professional educator and community development specialist, she engaged the children in discussions about mangrove tree adaptations to inter-tidal life and mangrove food webs.K' Donnapat's devised an educational snakes and ladder's game, where the children had to answer questions about wetlands to be able to move up and down the board.
The third group worked with K' Manoon from the the Dept for Marine and Coastal Resources', who talked about uses and outputs from mangroves.When the group came back together, Jim from Mangrove Action Project covered the problems related to plastic bags, the fact that they take years to degrade, and are often used only once, for just a few minutes. To give the children a permanent reminder, each student was given a cloth bag to keep.
After lunch at the school we asked the children to draw what they wanted their mangroves to look like in the future and then discuss their thoughts in front of everyone else.

After the drawings were presented we moved to the rehabilitation site, where community leaders Bang Dol and Bang Mardee talked with the local children about their experiences of cutting all the mangrove for charcoal in the 1990s and the resulting disastrous effects.

We finished with a brief description of the restoration work at the site and why we were running this project, and Bang Dol concluded the discussions with a brief summary of his crab group's activities.

Thank you to all who took part, the teachers, the support from the DMCR, the people of Bang Lang Da, the children, and the amazing energy of K' Ning and K' Donnapat.

Nursery Species Thrives On-Site

1st Feb saw a return to the site. The first for a while. Great to chat with the villagers, who of whom one had managed to break his leg on his motorbike and was suitably plastered. [Cultural learning # 76; people in Thailand seem not to write on plaster casts.] After the usual banter, where I form the butt of most jokes, and deservedly so, I headed down to the site.

Sadly, over the course of the November sojourn to the UK, all the metal rods were stolen from the site, marking out the control areas and test planting plots. These worked really well, not one moving from its position, nor dropping a rope. But they proved too tempting for someone and have not been seen since.
The good news was that not only were almost all the plants doing well, but the last experiment with Sesuvium on E2 was also thriving. Sesuvium portulacastrum is a stringy herb that likes full sun and is quite happy with salt. Goats also love it. Its utility in this context comes from its stringy nature. The herb it is good at trapping various mangrove seeds and propagules as they drift past on the water. This is useful here because the land is too low and the water at highest tide is at least at hilltop level. So when the rainy season (starts April-ish) brings the new seeds it will be interesting to see if any seeds get caught up in the Sesuvium.

Having inspected the plants I only wanted to get back into the rhythm of digging, so repaired channel 2D, added to G2 and formed a new hill (H2). Needless to say, then next morning was a slow start, feeling as though I'd been run through a mangle.

MAP's EMR Project at Ban Talay Nok. A successful conclusion to their mangrove work

Chums. Happy Christmas.

This is a 10 minute film that draws to a conclusion the work MAP has accomplished in Ban Talay Nok. Despite the land tenure and control difficulties, Jim and Ning have done incredibly well, and are held in great respect by the village. Please take time to watch it. The physical work is in a different style to BLD but uses the same thinking as my project.
Hope 2010 is muddy and successful
Very best
The Mud Lobster

MSc in Sustainable Development (Imperial / SOAS)

Delighted to tell you that the MSc is now officially dead. 76% for the research report ensures that the overall score is a Merit. So, back to the UK for graduation in March (15th) and perhaps a couple of warm flat beers. Thank you to all the people who have helped, researched with me, supervised, read bits, translated questionnaires and put up with my whining.

The Mud Lobster Takes a Holiday

Dear Friends
Just to let you know that I'll be out of Thailand for about a month, on leave in the UK. So the postings will slow, somewhat. But please feel free to get in contact. The email will be checked every so often.
Happy digging.
D

Mangrove Rehabilitation in Colombia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zML6FA22CnQ

This is a link to a youtube video. Please follow and watch the 6 minute film. It documents mangrove work by Prof Heliadoro Sanchez in Colombia. There are some interesting parallels with Bang Lang Da. An amazing man.

Deep and Wide and Painful

So, what's been happening down in the mud? A previous entry has described the visit from Japan, organised by the Ramsar Centre of Japan. Thrilled to say that now my MSc is completed (mid Sept). So for the last few weeks a lot of digging has been committed, and the plant data have been charted (next blog). As per a previous update what Jim and I discussed doing was widening and deepening the start of the main channel (2) from the sluice gate across the centre of the pond. This has been done, and produced some more hills, including A2, B2 and D2 (yes, we've gone round the alphabet already). Much has been learnt during this process. It's been hard slow work as the channel is already quite deep. Thus taking the sides back and sloping them over means shifting a huge amount of soil. Often there are a series of drainage holes on the surface near the edge of the channel. These holes mean that any soil below is not going to be that strong or stable. Therefore the subsoil has to be dug out. The implication of this is that sometimes the sides of a channel have to be lent right back to remove this unstable soil, (ie a LOT of digging) and to keep the weight off what is left. Otherwise the sides of the channel collapse inwards. The picture below is looking up the channel, which I was standing in at the time of taking this picture. At the top is what the original channel looks like, unaltered. The pool in the middle is an example of the excavation, the new channel floor being two feet lower than the current channel bottom. Near to me, the sides have collapsed inwards.

The soil itself has a very high clay content. Often it was possible to cut pieces out like blocks of cheese.

There have also been some amazing colours in the clay; yellows, light blues and reds. Though this might look like strata of sand, a 'finger test' of the coloured material revealed that it had the same consistency as normal clay.

Needless to say, because this channel is the lowest point on the site, it could only be worked at the lowest tides. It is only possible to work from the sluice gate upwards, not working downstream. However, because the total volume of water leaving the pond during any one tide is not great, the bottom of these new channels becomes filled with very fine silt and clay, rather than being scoured by the movement of the water.

When the tide was too high to permit work in Channel 2, a new branch (2D) has been excavated. 2 denotes that it drains into the main channel running across the pond. D as it's the fourth sub-channel to be created. 2D has been excavated as carefully as possible, digging out loose soil in the slopes, sloping the sides over as much as possible, trying to keep the hills made with the spoil back from the edge of the channel so their weight does not cause a cave-in and not excavating in a straight line. Below is an early picture of 2D coming to life, with some interesting if unmoved woodwork in the middle.

The new hills have been labelled and marked up on the map at the top of this blog. Some of them will be left blank to monitor natural regeneration. Some have been dibbled with seeds and propagules. And some have received test transplants from home. Over the course of this year I've been collecting seeds and growing them at home, to be able to watch their development. It has allowed me to experiment with various ideas, and look at tolerances. As I'm going on holiday Oct 22nd for a while, these mangroves are now being transported to the site - in some style, I might add.

Hill Y has received a pot of Rhizophora apiculata (above) from home, all of which had damaged buds. They have managed to recover from this early trauma and grow normally. Hill R has taken three Nypa fruticans palm plants. These are a species the local people use for their own livelihoods, so the site, once fully established, will have a good proportion of Nypa. These have been grown at home, and will be measured, monthly with the other hills that are monitored.

Two friends are visiting me from the UK. Over the weekend we will go to BLD and do the monthly measuring of all the plants being monitored. In the subsequent blog some of the initial data will be presented. In the meantime Rossi is back on his bike this weekend at Estorill, Portugal. Go Rossi!