Abstract
Abstract Sustainable management of rangeland ecosystems has direct implications for conservation of biological diversity and for the livelihoods of local communities in the Himalayan region in general and the Sagarmatha National Park and Buffer Zone (SNPBZ) in particular. This study aims to analyze the status of rangeland management in the SNPBZ from an ecological perspective. We used multivariate and bivariate analysis and geographic information system techniques to analyze ecological data and land use trends. A significant annual change with a 3.38% decrease in glacier area was observed between 1978 and 1996. We observed 168 plant species in the SNPBZ with a range of 3–17 species per sample plot, where about 67% of plants were found to be palatable for livestock. Our study shows that total available fodder biomass on rangeland in the SNPBZ has not been fully utilized yet, because the total available supply exceeds the present demand under some assumptions: reduction of biomass through grazing causes hig...
Highlights
The dilemma of rangeland management is related to debates about the state of biodiversity and its relationship to productivity, biomass, and disturbance by grazing (Grime 2002)
Sustainable management of the rangelands in the Himalayan region has generally not followed an approach in line with sound ecological studies due to inadequate knowledge and lack of information that is available in integrated scientific studies (Weltz et al 2003)
The national park is a government organization that works with a set of government policies, rules, and regulations, whereas the buffer zone is managed by a buffer zone management committee within each village that takes care of location-specific issues by collaborating with the national park authority
Summary
The dilemma of rangeland management is related to debates about the state of biodiversity and its relationship to productivity, biomass, and disturbance by grazing (Grime 2002). The disturbed vegetation with lower biomass but higher productivity may be characterized by an elevated number of species, according to the intermediate-disturbance hypothesis (Connell 1978; Grime 1979; Huston 1994) This hypothesis has generally been accepted (Katriona et al 2004) and has been verified in the Himalayas (Vetaas 2002; Bhattarai et al 2004). Rangeland in the Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone (SNPBZ) is not just a resource for sustaining livestock and one rich in biodiversity, including medicinal and aromatic plants. Sustainable management of the rangelands in the Himalayan region has generally not followed an approach in line with sound ecological studies due to inadequate knowledge and lack of information that is available in integrated scientific studies (Weltz et al 2003)
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