Pacific forestry institute
moving to bigger space

HILO » Mangrove forests around western Pacific islands protect those shores from tropical cyclones and even shielded some places from the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of Dec. 26.

But some of those shoreline forests are in decline and need human help, said Boone Kauffman, director of the Institute of Pacific Island Forestry of the U.S. Forest Service.

Closer to home, the nonnative, tree-sized weed miconia is well known as spreading in Hawaii and threatening forests here as it did in Tahiti.

Another tree, strawberry guava, which has been in Hawaii decades longer than miconia, is also taking over native forests while drawing little public attention.

These are some of the projects, fostering beneficial forests and controlling threats to them, which are the job of the Institute of Pacific Island Forestry.

Since its creation in 1957 as the Hawaii Forestry Research Center, the agency has operated out of borrowed space.

On Tuesday, a permanent, five-acre home for the institute will be dedicated on the upper campus of the University of Hawaii at Hilo, above Komohana Street.

The $10.2 million facility consists of four buildings and two shade houses with a total of about 22,000 square feet of floor space.

The facility will enable the institute to shift somewhat to a greater emphasis on applied research, meaning control of nonnative species, for example, Kauffman said.

For instance, those pervasive but little-noticed strawberry guava trees are "eating up the lands like cancer," he said. Their fruit also provides a ready source of food for fruit flies, which then attack commercial fruit crops.

The long-term answer is some kind of biological control, he said.

The work is done in cooperation with other agencies such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which has selected the Big Island as one of its global laboratories, he said.

Carnegie takes aerial photos of the Big Island showing, for example, the distribution of another invasive species, the faya tree, which threatens native forests.

Often, basic research is needed before control work can be done. Kauffman compared it to curing sickness in people. "We have to understand how the human body works before we can control disease," he said.