Seeing the wood for the trees: an assessment of the impact of participatory forest management on forest condition in Tanzania

Abstract

We thank the staff of the Forestry and Beekeeping Division for sharing data obtained through the national assessment of PFM in Tanzania, and their agreement to use these data. The national PFM assessment, as well as the forest assessment work undertaken by J. Isango, was made possible by a grant to the government of Tanzania from the Danish government under a wider grant in support of PFM. The work by K. Pfliegner around Uluguru was supported by a research grant from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) and undertaken in cooperation with the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania. Much of the work undertaken by E. Zahabu was supported by the Netherlands Directorate for Development Cooperation through the University of Twente, Netherlands. Disturbance transect data from the Eastern Arc Mountains analysed by A. Ahrends come from reports produced mainly by Frontier-Tanzania (a collaboration of the Society for Environmental Exploration and the University of Dar es Salaam). We gratefully acknowledge the efforts of the Society for Environmental Exploration staff in London (especially E. Fanning) and the many Frontier-Tanzania staff and volunteers who collected data, especially N. Doggart, K. Doody, C. Bracebridge, V. Williams and N. Owens. Data for the coastal forests were primarily collected by A. Ahrends and B. Mhoro using funding from CEPF, WWF-Tanzania and the University of Greifswald, Germany. We also thank WWF-US and University of Cambridge, UK (Valuing the Arc) for covering the time of N. Burgess during the preparation of this paper. A. Ahrends was funded by the Marie-Curie Excellence programme of the European 6th Framework under contract MEXTCT- 2004-517098 to Dr. Rob Marchant, who we also thank for useful comments on an earlier draft. Two anonymous referees also provided valuable suggestions. Fig. 1 was prepared by J. Green, supported by WWF-US.