Tobago P3DM - The missing islet

SCARBOROUGH, 7 October, 2012. A lot of positive developments today. Successive groups of residents kept noting two missing islets (Goat Island and Little Tobago) and pointed out that Little Tobago is a bird reserve.

Adam and other facilitators add the missing islets to the model

Adam, one of the workshop participants who used to work at UWI rose to the challenge of preparing the needed contour map far from his GIS lab and using a locally available ink-jet printer to plot the islets out. Kail provided him with the SRTM data and Sarah, one of the UWI graduate students helped Adam obtain the bathymetry. And … magic …by the end the day, Little Tobago and other missing islets were placed onto the model and smoothed with crepe paper.

Informants were entering data on the model in the afternoon. Facilitators sorted out the documentation for the working legend, printed out legend keys so that the facilitating teams could have a mini legend they could refer to while interacting with community members over the model.

According to Kail “the high point of the day for me was when the residents in hilly areas distinguished between different forest categories. Previously, as workshop participants from Trinidad pointed out, most people thought there was just Forest, which meant the Forest Reserve. It turned out they have at least 3 broad categories: the Main Ridge Forest, a primary forest which is a reserve area and enjoying legal protection for vital watershed services; the High Woods, a secondary forest where hunting areas and trails may be found; and the Bush or Woods, a forest area used for multiple agricultural uses (mixed crops such as plantain, cassava, and others). This tells me that Tobagonians are dependent or reliant on forest resources, and the many categories of forest use indicate that they have a complex relationship with the forest area.”

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