Ghana to launch mapping of baobab population

Ghana has begun moves to establish a validated national inventory atlas and geodatabase to support baobab conservation, sustainable use, policy, investment and community livelihoods.

The Ho Technical University (HTU), the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) – Plant Genetic Resources Research Institute (PGRRI) and Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Germany, have officially launched the project at the HTU on Monday.

The project aims at mapping the baobab population (BAOMAP project) across the country.

The research initiative, which had already begun, would combine remote sensing and ground verification surveys to identify and classify baobab (Adansonia digitata) populations, collect biometric and ecological data as well as produce district and national maps.

It is also to establish a geo-referenced national database and generate recommendations for conservation, domestication and commercial utilisation with funding support of 54,000 euros from Rhine-Waal University, with workplan spanning July-December, this year.

Dr Daniel Ashie Kotey, the Director, CSIR-PGRRI, in a keynote address, said his outfit is expected to leverage its national mandate and experience in the collecting, characterisation, documentation and conservation of baobab genetic resources.

He said CSIR-PGRRI, which hosts the National Genebank at Bunso, has since 2024 been working on baobab with the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), whose tree genebank is in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Between them, these efforts have collected baobab germplasm and documented passport data, including the collecting sites and geographic coordinates of populations in different parts of Ghana, he added.

He underscored the importance of the baobab tree, which is widespread in many rural and semi-rural communities, a place of meeting, the landmark that gives directions, and the shade under which disputes are settled.

Dr Kotey said: “It is also a source of food and medicine. Its leaves are an essential vegetable for our soups and sauces; its fruit pulp is a key ingredient in refreshing and nutritious drinks; its seeds are processed for food and oil; and its bark is twisted into rope or prepared as medicine.”

He disclosed that Ghana’s draft revised National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) for 2025 to 2030, is handy and estimates that the Guinea Savannah woodland, where the baobab thrives, shrank from 59,342 to 57,906 square kilometres between 2015 and 2021.

He added over the same period, land cultivated to food crops rose from 18.6 to 20.3 per cent of the country’s land area. Similarly, since 1990, the land area devoted to crops has grown by 303 per cent while settlements increased by about 673 per cent.

He said the research would target ‘where baobab populations were, what is their structure, where are young trees surviving, which populations face specific threats, whether from human activity or from natural factors and what do the people who live among these trees know about them.’

Dr Kotey said these efforts should result in the broad benefits of conservation, domestication, commerce, and resilient livelihoods.

“Let us make the data credible; let us make the information usable, let us make the system sustainable, let us respect the people and their knowledge, and let us connect BAOMAP to the national agenda.

He appealed to all including traditional and local government authorities, Civil society organisations, the private sector, policymakers, farmers, processors and consumers will all be key to turning the project’s outputs into value.

“From the tree to the map; from the map to knowledge; and from knowledge to action,” he added, and urged the private sector to invest in research and invest in ways that keep the resource that baobab is, renewable with the media telling this story accurately and patiently, because the results will come in stages.

Prof Dr Mathias Kleinke, an agricultural engineer and environmental researcher at Rhine-Waal University and Applied Sciences, who led the mobilisation of funds from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, would coordinate the project with remote sensing expertise, training and validation.

Professor Ben Q. Honyenuga, the Vice Chancellor of HTU, launched the BAOMAP project said as a university, it would step up more research into the value-chains of baobab, believing that this stocktaking project has the capacity to place HTU onto the international research map.

He was optimistic that the research would produce a national population-density map, regeneration hotspots, threat-risk layers and district summaries for the sustainability of the baobab tree for posterity.

Professor Honyenuga said the HTU governing council, academic council, management and students are upbeat about the project and waits for the outcomes to inform policy and research.

Prof Kenneth Fafa Egbadzor, the Principal Investigator, HTU said has been working on baobab since 2018 and has generated groundbreaking knowledge on the species said the research is designed to address, by providing baseline spatial data on baobab populations that can be harmonised and validated to support long-term monitoring, genetic diversity assessment, planning and policy, and sustainable use and benefit-sharing.

He said the fruiting period has been reduced through clonal propagation to 27 months from between 25 – 30 years for fruiting in the wild with the research expected to target some 10,000 trees in three months.

Prof Egbadzor urged stakeholders especially the government to make a buy-in as the prospects for baobab are enormous and could be more lucrative than Ghana’s foreign earner, the cocoa, adding baobab could outlive all ecological geo-locations of the country.

He said variability of baobab should be explored more, is leaves, stem, roots, taste among others

Source: GNA

The post Ghana to launch mapping of baobab population appeared first on Ghana Business News.