The joint expedition of the US American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Cuba´s National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) concluded their visit to Alejandro de Humboldt National Park (PNAH).
The joint expedition of the US American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Cuba´s National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) concluded their visit to Alejandro de Humboldt National Park (PNAH).
The multidisciplinary team reports on this journey, during which they conducted plant genetic studies of vertebrates and invertebrates, in this vast protected area core of the reserve of the Toa biosphere.
Creditor the honorary title of World Heritage granted in 2001 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), PNAH is distinguished by the high degree of conservation and endemism of its biodiversity, the richest of the Insular Caribbean.
The American researcher Ana Luz Porzecanski, Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation said AMNH that since decades such an expedition had not been carried out through these sites of the Sagua-Baracoa Massif, considered one of the existing biodiversity hotspots in the world.
Porzecanski hopes this journey along the best preserved tropical rain forests of the region, become the starting point for further researches between Cuba and the United States.
The Caribbean archipelago and the northern nation share 49 animal species and eight species of plants declared by International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) as "globally endangered".
Among the findings reported by the bipartisan expedition appears the discovery of a species of amphibian called Eleutherodactylus beguei small, endemic to the area of Municion, located in the Guantanamo municipality of Yateras.
Something that drew the attention of the foreign party was the management by the Cuban government, especially the National Center for Protected Areas and the UPSA, in conserving the habitat of the also known as ivory-billed woodpecker.
Today the expedition will visit Villa del Guaso and the Hall of the Nature of the Provincial Museum, where the descent module of the Soyuz 38 spacecraft used by the cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Soviet Yuri Romanenko is also on exhibition.
Source: ACN
Translation: Ilia Charon