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Main Source Material: A Vegetation Classification: Implications for Conservation: Prepared by Kevel Lindsay and Bruce Horwith of The Island Resource Foundation, Eastern Caribbean Biodiversity Programme, November, 1999. (288kb - Word format or 664kb - PDF format) This website report presents a vegetation classification system for St. Kitts and Nevis to guide biodiversity conservation efforts in that country. Thirty-six Alliances and Associations were identified. These are based on the National Vegetation Classification System developed as a U.S. standard (proposed as a global standard) by the United States Federal Geographic Data Committee, which in turn is part of a larger worldwide initiative to characterize land cover and land use in a standardized manner. The classification presented in this report differs from previous vegetation
studies:
Click here for a comprehensive list of all plants found on St. Kitts & Nevis Introduction This vegetation
classification for St. Kitts and Nevis is designed to provide Ideally, conservation efforts will be prioritized and guided by information on distribution and abundance at the species level; but, as a first step, a less resource-intensive approach, one that works at a community level, has been used in this report. The classification identifies 36 Alliances and Associations (defined below), which are sufficiently different from one another to be distinguishable in the field, and probably from aerial photos. The "Location" heading in the classification tables after page 27identifies where to find particularly good examples of each vegetation type, which can be visited to reinforce the descriptions. An obvious conservation
priority that evolves directly from the classification is the importance of
ensuring that at least a few sites of each of the natural communities are
protected. Not only would this protect the country's biodiversity at the
ecosystem level, but at the species level it should provide substantial
protection of much of the flora and fauna. A conservation status summary is
presented following the classification. Amidst the assembly of diverse island ecosystems that form the northeastern boundary of the Caribbean basin, St. Kitts (called this as a shortened version of St. Christopher since the eighteenth century) and Nevis have together succeeded in fashioning for themselves a national identity and a public image of uniqueness derived in part from the country's distinctive, dramatic and spacious landscape profile. Each island, one larger, one smaller, is dominated by a single, fairly youthful volcanic cone surrounded by fertile slopes, called glacis, falling away almost uniformly but always gracefully towards the sea in all directions. There is little of the flatness of a Barbados, only a touch of the dryness of an Antigua, and none of the mountainous irregularity of a Grenada, a St. Vincent, a St. Lucia or a Dominica — with their convoluted interior terrain and maze-like radiating ridges, spurs and deep, isolated valleys, bound together by a narrow coastal strip of densely-populated land which guards the few entries to less accessible hinterland. By way of contrast, the so-called hinterland of St. Kitts and Nevis is open for all to see, from coastline to mountaintop in one continuously graceful sweep, a verdant display of microhabitat variation and altitudinally conditioned biodiversity. The whole is comprehensible, center to edge, core to periphery, the inside and the outside are one. Even the central massif is crossed by the old military road at Phillips Level in St. Kitts; while Nevis, two centuries ago, had an upper level, circular road around Nevis Peak at about the 1,000 foot contour level with open, cultivated land above this road (reopened in 1998 as a hiking trail). Perhaps this openness, this variable display of nature's vegetational splendor in the sunlight and the rain, is why Kittitians and Nevisians take obvious pride in what their separate but almost linked pair of islands looks like, from the air, from land and from the sea. They talk about it, and they are quite aware of its history. They seem to have an innate understanding that the assembled landscape features, both natural and man-made, really do constitute a remarkable resource, part of the national patrimony, and a thing of value that is priceless. This distinguishing feature, the biogeographical face of the country that is called landscape, was shaped in its present form not just by nature but by the interaction of man and nature over time. In St. Kitts, several centuries of conscientious land husbandry on sugar estates have left an aesthetically pleasing, orderly, well-proportioned rural landscape or "countryside", disproving the universality of the customary argument about the damaging effects of plantation-based monoculture — or at least confirming a Kittitian exception to the rule. Meanwhile, the long, less satisfactory experience of Nevis with sugar, at least until the 1950s, and since then with free-grazing goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, has scarred and ravaged a vegetation that would have otherwise helped stem wind and water erosion and reduced the impact of sediments transported by run-off to coastal waters and reefs. The two islands are only
separated physically by a modest ocean channel known appropriately as the
"Narrows," which is neither wide nor deep but is nonetheless metaphorically
profound (see Figure 2). This situation is reflected in the unique kind of
binary "Federation" under which the two officially operate as one.
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