Chilean Forest Fires Devastate Ancient Trees

The monkey puzzle tree, much loved in English suburban gardens, has been brought close to extinction in the wild by disastrous forest fires which have burned down 71% of its stronghold in Chile's Malleco national reserve, the United Nations Environment Programme said yesterday.

Some trees were 2,000 years old. The south of Chile is known to tourists for its dramatic landscape and temperate rainforests.

After years of destruction the monkey puzzle tree is now found in the wild in two small areas in the Andes and on the coastal mountain range.

In the UK it was much loved by the Victorians as an ornamental tree, and it remained popular in suburbia until the 1930s. A fashionable revival recently has put thousands on sales in garden centres, but these are grown from carefully controlled seed banks.

Fires in the past southern summer destroyed 30,000 hectares of native forest, and supplies of seeds are disappearing.

Research by Cristian Echeverria for Unep has revealed the far-reaching implications of the forest fires in Chile.

He is pioneering a technique for mapping the fragmentation of the forest using remote sensing satellite images from the past 25 years to assess the rate at which native forest is being removed.

In one of the study areas 64% of the wild forest has been lost in 25 years and the continuous forest cover broken.

Reconstructed maps show that in 1550, when the Europeans arrived, the entire country would have been forest.

In 1990 the monkey puzzle was declared a protected species in Chile, and felling it was forbidden.

Its plight is being used to highlight the threats forest fires pose to endangered tree species.

In all there are 8,000 species on the danger list, 10% of the total number identified.

The environmental organisation Fauna & Flora International and the Unep World Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge are collaborating on the Global Trees Campaign, which aims to establish the management plans vital for keeping forests sustainable.

An important element of this is the development of a mapping programme leading to a world atlas of threatened trees.

Mark Collins, director of the WCMC, is concerned that the future of wild forests has worsened since the centre published the first global assessment, The World List of Threatened Trees, five years ago.

"New research, such as that on the monkey puzzle, is revealing that fragmentation of wild forest and their replantation with potentially invasive foreign species are major threats," he said.

Peter Ashton of Harvard and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, supports his concern.

He said: "In the tropics many rare tree species are already functionally extinct.

"The high diversity of plants in tropical rainforests means that specimens are naturally widely spaced; if forest cover is further fragmented, then the probability of a pollinator being within range decreases.

"Some forests are becoming living museums."