How the girls and teenagers of Piura Highlands contribute to science?

Written and photographed by Mariluz Mejía, distributed by agrored Norte.

 

Girls and teenagers of Provinces Ayabaca and Huancabamba, highlands of Piura Department, participate in the ethnical-botanical investigation made by Agrored Norte & Mountain Institute, funded by Peru’s National Council of Science & Technology, Ministry of environment, and Ministry of Agrarian Development & Irrigation, about the potential of wild fruit species of páramos and cloud forests.

 

They are high-school students of Totora school, Pacaipampa District (Ayabaca Province) and Cajas-Shapaya’s Virgen del Carmen School, El Carmen de la Frontera District (Huancabamba Province).

 

Those girls and teenagers mean a potential in scientific knowledge generation to value the riches of Piura Andes biodiversity, that belongs to the families living around the páramos and cloud forest ecosystems

 

The contribution of the girls’ knowledge  about  the fruit species, which they feed and strengthen their health, has been very important to this investigation.

 

They have given their testimony about the place where the edible species are located, the distinction between those can be consumed as food anand those that, also, are medicinal, the time of the year when they search them to consume on their way to their schools, the distinction between the species able to crop and unable to crop, as well as the ways to consume them as fresh fruit, jams, porridges, or refreshes.

 

This knowledge acquired from parents and relatives, once shared with the researchers, orient the scientific investigation to value the biodiversity, their traditional knowledge as well.

 

They form human capital for regional, national development since the creation of highly differentiated products based on endemic and wild species grown by those high-importance ecosystems in the reduction of global warming and their fundamental role to regulate the hydric cycle  of basins in Piura Department.

 

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