Landscape Architect Articles

Trees for Driest Place on Earth04-22-09 | News

Trees for Driest Place on Earth

The southern coast of Peru is one of the driest places on Earth. By helping to restore the shrinking native forests, the aim is to benefit local people and wildlife, prevent soil erosion, and help alleviate climate change.

The strip of desert between the Andean mountains and the Pacific Ocean has an annual average rainfall as low as 1.5mm.

By way of comparison, London enjoys around 650mm a year.

It?EUR??,,????'?????<

?EUR??,,????'?????<

In this parched landscape, the hardy huarango is no stranger to thirst. Although rain seldom falls, it is able to capture moisture from other sources ?EUR??,,????'?????<

The tree under threat is the huarango, Prosopis limensis, found only in the Ica region of Peru. The huarango is also a valuable source of food and fuel, and a keystone of the local ecosystem. Whaley estimates that when he arrived in Peru, just 1 percent of the original local forest habitat remained ?EUR??,,????'?????<

The problems facing dry forest habitat are not unique to Peru.

Mr Aronson, who heads the Restoration Ecology Group in the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, adds there are more than 1,000 species of tree that grow in desert areas.

The project has already had some successes, with a reserve set up in Tunga and more planned.