DOLPHIN HEAD, Hanover – Some 20 residents from the communities of Riverside, Kingsvale, Rugland and Retirement in Hanover were on Friday certified as protectors of the Dolphin Head forest reserve at a ceremony to mark the completion of the area’s live botanical museum.

As such, their role will be to protect and nurture the unique repository for rare, threatened and endangered plant species that are endemic to Jamaica.

The museum, which forms part of a 2.4 km hiking trail being constructed by the Dolphin Head Trust (DHT) through funding from the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica (EFJ), since last year, was funded by the Global Environment Facility’s small grants programme.

It features an attractively built wooden shelter replete with furniture built by the Dolphin Head Bamboo Facility, and is expected to facilitate the empowerment of the residents, according to Paula Hurlock, DHT’s executive director.

“This place was built for us and for our Jamaican children and our Jamaican people to become more educated about our natural resources, our natural history,” Hurlock told guests at the ceremony.

“We are also going to try to incorporate a little bit of culture so the theme of this hiking trail will be ‘nature and culture wrapped up on a trail’ because the richest part of our nation is its nature, its culture and its people. Now, if it happens that this area has recreational potential and can be a tourism attraction, then that is good. However, we are targeting mostly students… We need to move away from this whole thing of building things for tourists. We need to start looking at ourselves and empowerment and upliftment of our local students.”

Friday’s ceremony was followed by a tour of the museum which, apart from the neatly constructed stone pathway which forms a loop around the plants, a wooden trellis to define the entrance of the museum and the signs denoting the scientific names of the various species, have no walls or any other form of traditional construction. Towering limestone rocks form the backdrop and create the infrastructure for the plant life which fascinated the group of observers.

Ultimately, Hurlock said, the DHT will create the legal framework through which the hiking trail and museum will provide an alternative livelihood for the local and indigenous communities surrounding the reserve.

The reserve will become operational after the rainy season in June when several Dolphin Head endemic plants that are currently in the green house will be transferred to the museum.

“Eventually we will hope to put in campsites and cottages and people will want to come and spend a weekend here just to get away from Kingston,” she said.

In the meantime, the residents are to be trained as tour guides, while the communities are to be sensitised over a one-year period with funds approved by the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF) a month ago.

“The trust sees the preparation and sensitisation of the local communities for the influx of guests into the area, as critical to ensuring sustainable development from project ownership perspective,” said Hurlock. ” In other words, if they accept that they have a stake in it, they’ll pull out all the stops to ensure that it achieves the highest international standard. This we intend to do over the next year so that they will be ready when the time comes.”

The Dolphin Head Mountains feature forests which are home to a complex ecosystem. Various factors, including deforestation, have contributed to the deterioration of the natural resource. However, this has abated somewhat through the DHT’s collaborative efforts with the Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry Department, whose regional manager, Michael Barrett, on Friday urged the residents to nurture and protect what he described as a world-class facility.