Ya’axché’s Protected Areas Program safeguards 163,882 acres of forests across 4 protected areas. Within these protected areas lie the headwaters of 6 watersheds, habitats of 37 globally threatened species and 18 endemic species. The protection of these natural resources is done through strategic surveillance and enforcement patrols as well as biodiversity monitoring. On average, the PAM ranger teams conduct 500 patrols per year, including foot patrols and joint patrols with conservation partners and national security agencies.
The four protected areas under Ya’axché’s management form part of Belize’s National Protected Areas System which boasts well over 100 protected areas across the country. This system supports a wider range of environmental/ecosystem services which all Belizeans benefit from either directly or indirectly. Ya’axché is proud to be a major contributor to the protection and management of Belize’s protected areas through its efforts in the Toledo District and more specifically within the Maya Golden Landscape.
Enforcement and Compliance
Management of protected areas has more to do with managing anthropogenic activities than it does with managing the protected areas themselves. Our approach rests on voluntary compliance with rules and regulations surrounding protected areas. But this is often not enough and must be combined with other measures such as enforcement of such rules and regulations. Ya’axché’s ranger team is the frontline workforce and are the eyes and ears of the organization. The team conducts surveillance patrols and documents incidents of illegal activity. The data collected is essential in identifying illegal activity hotspots, types of infractions, and patterns of illegal activity across the protected areas. To make this process of data collection easier, Ya’axché uses the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool or better known as SMART. The use of SMART has vastly improved the tracking of activities and today we can see that illegal logging, hunting, agricultural incursions, and non-timber forest extraction remain the most common infractions. With strategic direction combined with Ya’axché’s education and awareness programs, the goal is to transition from a platform of enforcement to one of voluntary compliance.
Ya’axché Integrated Forest Management Database
Ya’axché began the development of an Integrated Forest Management Database System in 2020 to more effectively manage and utilize data collected by its various programs.
The first release of the system was deployed in February 2022 and update in October 2022. The database system includes protected areas managed by the PAM program, agroforestry data including beekeeping from the COL program, and soil monitoring data from the Science program. In addition to a centralized relational database hosted in the internet “cloud”, the database system includes a mobile application used to collect data offline in the field, and a web mapping and data visualization application. The web application shown below displays a subset of the data visible in a similar application for Ya’axché internal use only. Both web applications connect directly to the database, so that any database updates are visible in real time.
The map depicts where Ya’axché has helped to implement sustainable agroforestry and forest conservation practices. You can follow our progress as the database is updated with additional data on existing agroforestry plots and apiaries, and as additional farmers join with Ya’axché to improve their livelihoods and protect the forest ecosystem.