COURTESY OF THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
A declining pisonia forest at Palmyra Atoll illustrates the damage done by insect infestations.
|
|
Atoll as laboratory
Hawaii and mainland scientists head to Palmyra to study a coral ecosystem still largely untouched
DOZENS of top scientists are launching cooperative research on remote Palmyra Atoll that could provide new insights into climate change, disappearing coral reefs and other global environmental issues.
The consortium, which includes the University of Hawaii, Stanford University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, will use a $1.5 million research center recently built on the atoll's Cooper Island by the Nature Conservancy.
"The thing that makes Palmyra so sexy to a researcher is that there are very few human impacts," said Barry Stieglitz, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's senior policy-maker for Pacific islands.
Studying the coral reef ecosystem on this tiny National Wildlife Refuge, 960 miles south of Honolulu, will be "establishing a base line against which other places can be measured," he said.
According to Rob Dunbar, a Stanford oceanographer who has helped set the consortium in motion, projects will include:
» Learning about long-term cycles of wet and dry years, by decoding information stored in coral colonies that are thousands of years old.
» Better understanding of how humans have affected coral reef ecosystems on inhabited islands by studying the almost untouched plants and animals of an ocean paradise.
» Striving to save a tropical forest of pisonia trees from the onslaught of invasive ants and scale disease.
"This place is so remote," Stieglitz said. "It's not like any other place."
The Nature Conservancy bought the formerly private atoll, with 600 land acres and 480,000 acres of submerged reef, from the Fullard-Leo family in 2000, then sold most of it to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
COURTESY OF THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
The atoll's native coconut crab.
|
|
The atoll's water and land is home to 125 different coral species (three times more than in Hawaii), 29 bird species, the endangered green sea turtle and dozens of other marine creatures.
The Fullard-Leo family turned down development offers over the years that proposed turning the atoll into a nuclear depository or a casino.
On the several hundred land acres the Nature Conservancy kept, it used a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to build a research station that can accommodate up to 20 researchers at a time. The complex has an up-to-date lab, 100,000-gallon freshwater catchment, 24-hour electricity and an environmentally friendly septic system.
The 14 small screened-window huts for researchers to live in are simple but pleasant, said Dunbar, who hopes to spend about three weeks a year there over the next five years.
"I hope it will have a lot to tell us about a healthy marine ecosystem," said Suzanne Case, executive director of the Nature Conservancy in Hawaii, as well as document the effects of a Navy air base there in World War II.