Legambiente, along with FirstFlora, offers a voluntary work camp for environmental action and study of life in the forest.
Work is from Monday to Friday.
Saturday and Sunday’s are rest days with a transfer to the sea at Itacaré. Itacaré is a fishing village of wonderful tropical beauty, with the forest which flows into the sea, beautiful waves and the old port for the loading of cocoa.
Indeed, the area is called Costa do Cacao, whose capital Ilheus is a place setting of the novels of Jorge Amado.
Itacaré today is also a tourist town, home once a year, of the world women's surfing championship.
The Reserve is within the Atlantic Forest biome, one of the richest biodiversity in the world, but that has now lost 92% of its original extension to deforestation. In 2000 the Atlantic Forest of Bahia was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and priority at global level for conservation of biodiversity. The Atlantic Forest biome is considered a ‘Hot Spot’ (Hot Spot criteria: at least 1,500 species of endemic vascular plants, loss of at least 70% of original).
The catchment area of the Reserva Natural Janaina has the absolute world record for biodiversity tree with 454 different tree species per hectare of which 53% are endemic.
In the second place, far away, is the Peruvian Amazon with 300 species. There are at least 26 species of primates living in the Atlantic Forest, 21of which are endemic. After Colombia and Peru, Brazil is the third country in the world famous for its variety of birds. Opportunities for birdwatching in the Reserva Natural Janaina are extraordinary.
In 2007 Prof. André M. Amorim, world-renowned botanist and coordinator for the research of the New York Botanical Garden, said, after research on the region, that Reserva Natural Janaina is a priority for conservation of the Mata Atlantica biome.
Within the Reserve there are approximately 30 hectares dedicated to permaculture mainly cocoa, which is designed to create a permanent model school for economic development of local communities. The project work is divided into several modules: cataloguing of cocoa trees, reforestation with endemic species in order to expand the buffer areas of the Reserve, permaculture, fire monitoring and surveillance against poaching. Participants will assist in the production of chocolate through all its stages: collecting cocoa pods, fermented almonds, natural sun drying, roasting and finally processing manually, to get an organic chocolate. Starting from August 2008 FirstFlora, Legambiente and University of Milan Bicocca, Dipartment of Science of Environment and Territory, Center of Study for the Conservation of Plant Biodiversity, started the project of mapping the DNA of the cocoa Reserva Natural Janaina to counter the danger of an increasingly global spread of cocoa clones, GMOs grown under full sun. The germplasm of cocoa cannot be, in fact, kept in the orthodox way, namely in the form of semi-dried and stored at low temperature. The germplasm of cocoa can be stored only on living trees. The future of cocoa depends on the availability on a large scale of different germplasm in order to produce plants resistant to diseases present and future and, quality plants suited to local climates.
The volunteers will then have a way to learn elements of botany and tropical forest agriculture.
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