Through high-coverage satellites, forestry engineer Álvaro Zambrano has carried out evaluations of indiscriminate deforestation carried out in the Torres Municipality of Lara State. Widespread uncontrolled deforestation is a latent danger to the population of the second most important municipality in the region and the largest in territorial extension.
By: Yanitza Martínez // La Patilla Correspondent
According to engineer Zambrano, the Torres Municipality has lost around 21,900 hectares of its territory, equivalent to 4% of its tree cover due to deforestation and forest fires registered in this jurisdiction, where about 25 fires per week are counted.
For the engineer, deforestation and fires in the Torres municipality have as a serious consequence the loss of water quality in the Atarigua and Los Quediches reservoirs, since when the forests disappear, the environment looses the filtration of water and the fixation of the necessary nutrients in the soils to runoff.
The increase in deforestation and thus runoff causes an increase in algae, the loss of oxygen and, therefore, the quality of the water decreases which, by the way, does not go through a purification plant and reaches the inhabitants of Torres completely raw.
Among other things, Zambrano points out that the Torres Municipality became the first in Lara State to lose forest cover, and that as deforestation increases, the greater the loss of water quality in its reservoirs. Given this, he suggests monitoring the water masses of both reservoirs through technologies that provide real-time data on water quality to determine its pH, temperature, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen in the liquid.
In a report prepared by the engineer Zambrano, it is stated that this situation has been getting worse in the last 10 years, exactly since 2001, in which a loss of 820 hectares of tree cover was also recorded in Venezuela.
Illegal mining
The study also indicates that most of this deforestation is associated with charcoal production in the Camacaro and Reyes Vargas parishes, a situation that has been monitored by lapatilla.com since 2022.
It has been ascertained that in the Camacaro Parish, specifically in Bosque Seco, there were around 980 Vera – A very slow growing hardwood – trees older than 100 years, and so far more than 600 of them have been felled.
The extraction of charcoal from the banks of the Tocuyo River is supposedly carried out by some 40 companies that migrated from Cojedes State, without any type of permits, and have also extended to the Espinoza de los Monteros and Altagracia parishes.