Mount St. Catherine Forest Reserve Environmental Baseline Assessment (2018)

The official crown land survey of the Mt. St. Catherine Forest Reserve was completed in August 2002 for the Forestry and National Parks Department of Grenada at the time, and approved on August 28th, 2002, by Andrew Alleyne (incumbent Director of the Land Use Division in 2002, and current Minister for Housing, Lands and Community Development). A number of public notifications were disseminated during this survey, including direct delivery of notices to adjacent landowners as pre-emptive measures to avoid potential issues with farm tenancy and/or settlement claims (see Appendix 6.1). More recently, a formal public notice was published advising any potential landownership claims to be submitted before November 30th, 2016, to the Land Use Division (pers. comm., V. Msacky, Director of Land Use Division, April 2018). 

The Mt. St. Catherine Forest Reserve survey limits were then georeferenced in June 2018 with the assistance of Global Parks (Fig. 2). To facilitate the accurate positioning of the reserve limits, field trips were first conducted in April 2018 to locate boundary markers and to map environmental features that were then used to transpose survey boundaries into a geographic coordinate system. Heretofore, boundary limits and related land-use and land-classification (LULC) information presented relative to the forest reserve and adjacent areas could not be accurately determined.

 This environmental baseline assessment (EBA) is part of Global Park's consultancy to prepare a management plan for the proposed Mt. St. Catherine Forest Reserve, which is one of a number of objectives to be fulfilled by the project Implementing a Ridge-to-Reef Approach to Protecting Biodiversity and Ecosystems Functions within and around Protected Areas in Grenada. The EBA supports a previous literature review, desktop species assessment, and a socio-economic report.

Area of interest: Grenada

Year: 2018