Abstract
The contribution of remnant trees in traditional agro forestry systems in recent times has attracted significant attention from policy makers, stakeholders, and academicians due to their important role in conserving biodiversity within agricultural systems, reserves of genetic resources and provision of other important environmental services. The study seeks to determine socioeconomic factors influencing farmers’ decision to maintain remnant trees in agricultural landscape. Data was solicited from 220 households in three rural communities through structured interviews and on farm visitations. We employed Poison and Negative Binomial Regressions to determine factors influencing rural farm households’ decision to retain remnants forest tree species in agro ecosystem. The regression results indicated that the key factors strongly affecting farmers’ on-farm conservation decision to retain remnant forest trees in agricultural landscape were age, gender, years of schooling, religion, land tenure, farmers’ perceptions to current environmental problems, distance to farm land, erosion and the size of the landholdings. The study recommends that forest governance with focus on collaborative forest resource management and equitable distribution of benefits generated from extraction of forest resources should be given high impetus in policy formulation. The needs and concerns of forest fringe communities should feature paramount in this regard.
Highlights
On-farm conservation of forest tree genetic resource is seen as potential compliment to ex-situ conservation in safeguarding or protecting forest trees genetic material, high valued commercial timber species for future generation
This is seen in the light of numerous advantages over conventional methods of conserving plant material in agro ecosystem (Smale et al, 2002; Long et al, 2000)
The traditional smallholder agro forestry systems hold reserves of rich genetic resource of forest tree species and contain more timber trees than the remaining natural forest outside forest reserves (Robiglio et al, 2011).This is stemmed from the fact that farmers’ onfarm conservation decision is such that only high quality trees with desired attributes to provide varieties of products and services are usually left on the farmland during the land clearing phase of farm development for crop production (Anyonge and Roshetko, 2003)
Summary
On-farm conservation of forest tree genetic resource is seen as potential compliment to ex-situ conservation in safeguarding or protecting forest trees genetic material, high valued commercial timber species for future generation. The method of round log extraction in the country focuses on selective harvesting, which targets high quality merchantable matured trees to the detriment of poor quality, low value trees with crooked and malformed boles (e.g., Merry and Carter, 2001) These phenomena can erode the genetic base of these tree species or promotes dysgenics for the future generation (Snook, 1996). The traditional smallholder agro forestry systems hold reserves of rich genetic resource of forest tree species and contain more timber trees than the remaining natural forest outside forest reserves (Robiglio et al, 2011).This is stemmed from the fact that farmers’ onfarm conservation decision is such that only high quality trees with desired attributes to provide varieties of products and services are usually left on the farmland during the land clearing phase of farm development for crop production (Anyonge and Roshetko, 2003). Because of the benefits the farmers derive from forest trees on farmland and as a component of agriculture fields, which invariably contains cash and food crops, smallholder farmers take the necessary precautionary measures to protect these forest tree species (Degrande et al, 2006; Dumenu, 2010)
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