The Teide appears every few days in a new scientific publication. The rhythm, from 2009 to the present, is at the rate of two contents per month and the total up to 2018 reached 236, including 21 bachelor’s or master’s projects. The place interests the researchers. It is not for less: it is a privileged vantage point for the observation of fauna, flora or geomorphology. “The national parks, and El Teide in particular, are laboratories for research,” said the director-conservator of the Teide National Park, Manuel Durban, yesterday at the presentation of the book Science in Teide National Park 2009-2019, containing fifteen of the articles published in that time period.
The texts are signed by 20 scientists and make up a 283-page volume coordinated by Durbán himself and the biologist José Luis Martín Esquivel. Both announced the work together with the Minister of Management of the Natural Environment of the Council of TenerifeIsabel Garcia. “The technical and management decisions of this natural area are made based on scientific and technical criteria,” said the socialist, adding that the book “is an environmental education tool to bring these aspects closer to the public.” The work, edited by the insular institution and Turquesa Publications, is now on sale in the main bookstores in the Canary Islands at a price of around 32 euros and offers the reader a journey through technical aspects, although assimilable without the need to be an expert. .
“When nature management involves a important use in an environment of high ecological fragility, the need to incorporate science into decision-making becomes transcendental». This is how Durbán and Martín Esquivel pick it up in the book’s introduction and they explained it this way yesterday at the presentation. The volume begins with a statistical synthesis of the investigations that have been included in this editorial work; He goes on to address the advances on the aboriginal presence; devotes six chapters to the physical environment; many others focus on the biotic environment, “both with regard to the management of endangered species and subsoil fauna or the impacts that are resulting from global change”, and the closing section summarizes the ecological monitoring program being developed in the Park with the aim of “detecting signs of change and quantifying their importance”.
Archeology. In The human presence in the Cañadas del Teide: advances in archaeological research It is collected that one of the fields in which there has been a greater development in recent years has to do with the methods of prospecting and excavation of the deposits. “The incorporation of data into geographic information systems (GIS) has meant a real revolution in studies of the spatial distribution of deposits at all levels,” explains the author of the chapter, Matilde Arnay, from the Department of Geography and History of the University of La Laguna. Since 2011, a program of prospecting, drilling and archaeological excavations has been launched that incorporate the new procedures and that have been carried out in different areas and types of deposits. He mentions the La Bola Corridor, Chasogo Mountain, Cruz de Tea Mountain, Lomo de Chío, Los Corrales Mountain, La Grieta and La Angostura Cañada, Escondido Volcano, and La Fortaleza.
“The surface sites of residential character are the most numerous and representative within the archaeological context” of the National Park. “The excavations carried out applying current methodological procedures (photogrammetry, micromorphology, GIS, 3D reconstructions, etc.) have provided archaeological documentation of great interest”, highlights Arnay. Further on, the author dwells on the fact that one of the “newest” aspects of the latest archaeological work in the Teide National Park has been the location of different quarries-workshops for the manufacture of Guanche hand mills, which have been preserved “virtually intact” She also has her space in this section the study of the old roads and, in particular, the one that crossed Tenerife from the North to the South.
seismicity. María José Blanco and Carmen López sign Seismicity: taking the pulse of Teide. The researchers point out that the National Park includes geological structures “of great interest” such as the Las Cañadas depression, “whose origin has been the subject of controversy for decades”; the central volcanic edifice Teide-Pico Viejo, and numerous volcanic cones. “Today, the National Geographic Institute is capable of locating at least 75% of the seismicity detected in Tenerife and its surroundings, which means the location of some 1,200 annual earthquakes,” they quantify, relying on other authors.
climatic traits. “Climate change is already causing significant changes not only in the distribution of precipitation but, above all, in the increase in temperatures, especially in the minimum values and in recent decades.” This is how it is collected in Climatic features of the Teide National Park: singularity and diversity, by Abel López, Pedro Dorta, Jaime Díaz Pacheco, José Luis Martín Esquivel and Manuel Valentín Marrero, who also highlight “the great interannual irregularity implied by the increasingly frequent occurrence of extraordinary droughts.” And they state: “The summits of Tenerife have very unique features in the context of the Canary Islands. Its climatic characteristics are totally different from the middle and coastal sectors, where the population is concentrated. These peculiarities, exceptional for an archipelago located in subtropical latitudes, are explained by its high altitude and the constant presence of a subsidence thermal inversion».
When dealing with the “remarkable surface temperature inversions, with strong frosts throughout the year”, this group of experts wonders if the entire basin that makes up the Cañadas del Teide, fifteen kilometers in its largest diameter, “could also behave as a huge cold lake, similar to what has been observed in some valleys of the United States (Oregon Cascade Mountain) or the Alps, or huge sinkholes through which cold air drains through the narrow valleys of Boca Tauce and Chío, as has been described which seems to happen in similar geomorphological structures in the UK.
Endangered Species. One of the best news for the Park is the increase in some nuclei of protected species, protagonists of another of the most accessible chapters of the work for laymen in the matter. Some cases reach such a point that there are plant varieties that have gone from having “a few wild specimens to several thousand.” These are the data carried by Manuel Valentín Marrero and José Luis Martín Esquivel in Recovery of threatened species in the Teide National Park. One of the best examples of this rebound is that of the Guanche rosebush (Bencomia Exstipulata), of which 74 were counted in 1993. The figure in 2009 rose to 900, to continue growing during the following decade and reach 1,200 individuals distributed in ten localities. The jarilla de las Cañadas, the silver thistle, the mountain jopillo, the Canarian cedar or the Teide canutillo have also been analysed, as have the Teide and Guajara violets.
“We have seen that, among all the possible actions, planting in the natural environment, sometimes accompanied by fencing, is one of the most effective,” the authors conclude. Such is the case that, they point out, if these formulas had not been carried out in the face of their disappearance, the jarilla de las Cañadas, the silver thistle or the Guanche rosebush “would currently be on the brink of extinction.”
