THE Forestry Department will be re-marking the boundaries of a 28-kilometre stretch in the Cockpit Country by the end of March, as part of efforts to protect the forest reserve.

The department will be assisted by the Nature Conservancy Jamaica Country Programme (TNC-J) and Trees of Tomorrow – a project sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency – which has put up financing of $3.2 million.

The Cockpit covers an area of about 450 kilometres that straddles three parishes – Trelawny, St Ann and St Elizabeth. It is considered one of the most important centres of Jamaica’s biodiversity and cultural heritage.

“Cockpit Country is globally important. It is home to 101 plants that are known nowhere else in the world and all Jamaica’s endemic birds. It is also the main watershed for western Jamaica,” said Dr Ann Sutton, Director of Conservation for TNC-J.

The importance of the area, she pointed out, had been recognised many years ago, when the area was declared a ‘forest reserve’.

Alli Morgan, forest technical director at the Forestry Department, said the boundaries were last surveyed in the 1960s and have been covered by thick vegetation and trees.

“This has made it more difficult for the forest officers to police illegal activities in the reserve. In some areas, people are squatting, cultivating, and cutting lumber and yam sticks in the forest reserve,” said Morgan.

He said if the incursions were allowed to continue at their current pace, the forest reserve would be seriously denuded.

“The first thing to do is to establish the boundaries, so that action can be taken against violators, who sometimes argue that they are ignorant of the illegal nature of their activities,” he said.

“We have to control things from now, because what you are finding is a continual shift in cultivation . persons start at one point and when the soil is exhausted, they leave it and move on.”

The areas in which the boundaries will be re-established are the biological hot spots of:

. Lincoln Park in St Ann, last surveyed in the 1930s;

. Windsor in St Elizabeth; and

. Barbecue Bottom and Burnt Hill, both in Trelawny

So far, a surveyor has demarcated the areas in order to restore the buried reference monuments, which are concrete survey marks, or in some cases, large iron pegs.

In addition to restoring the physical monuments, Morgan said the department was utilising a global positioning system (GPS) instrument to reference monument marks so that they in turn, can be transferred to map.

The instrument was donated by TNC-J through the Cockpit Country Parks-in-Peril project (CCPiP).

The broad US$821,000 CCPiP project aims to ensure sustainable management of the Cockpit Country forests by 2007.