Forest Officials Research Articles

English

  This study investigates the patterns of land use change, the reasons for those changes and the vulnerability of forests in Nandi North forest zone in Kenya between the years 1986 to 1995 and 1995 to 2006. Landsat TM images of 1986, 1995 and ETM+ of 2006 were used to create single image depicting the sequence of land use change for the period between 1986 and 2006. The spatial relationship between forest cover change and the causes was determined based on the ground truthing and additional literature from the zonal forest officer and the zone management plan where a total of seven classes including dense natural forest, sparse forest, grassland, agricultural land, plantation forest, tea plantation and built up area was used for classification. Both unsupervised and supervised classifications were carried out using a false colour composite image for interpretation. Out of the seven classes, the results indicate an increase in agriculture over the study period while natural forests were reducing. Extreme poverty, planned deforestation for development needs, and unsustainable forest practices such as illegal logging, charcoal burning and encroachment were seen as key drivers of land use change as indicated by the information from the officer. Accessibility to the forest was a key threat to the existence of the forest. This is seen in the result where forest zones with gentle slopes and flat areas, lower elevation, close to roads and settlement had higher probability for conversion to other land uses due to easier access to them compared to steep slopes, with high elevation and which are from roads and settlement. The resulting vulnerability map categorized the forest into four degrees of varying vulnerability namely: highly vulnerable, moderately vulnerable, vulnerable and least vulnerable starting from the easily accessible to least accessible. The resultant map is important in forest conservation by the forest department as areas highly vulnerable can be put into high consideration at the same time involving the community adjacent to be involved in the management process.   Key words: Forest cover, LULC, change detection, vulnerability, GIS.

Tribe, Forest and Law the Development Debate

Forests have been the major source of livelihood for human beings since time immemorial. So far the tribal people of India are concerned; they have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forest due to their close proximity with the forest as the natural habitation. The tribal communities live in about 15 percent of the country's areas in various ecological and geo-climatic conditions, ranging from plants, forests, hills and inaccessible areas. The collection and marketing of Minor Forest Produce have been a major source of livelihood for the most tribal families contributing around 70 percent of their total income. Forest can be better protected by the people living in the forest and depending for their survival on its natural wealth. However, once the deprivation of right to live in the forest started way back in 1865, when the first Imperial Forest Act was enacted and Imperial Forest Department was established, and that has continued even after the six decades of independence, it resulted into conflict and tension between the forest officials and forest dwellers, especially the tribal people. The paper seeks a critical note on the history of forest laws and policies in India and their impact on tribal people with the following objectives: 1. o trace the historical importance afforests on the life and living of the tribal people 2. To highlight the impact of policies/approaches adopted by the planners of the country for the development of tribal people 3. To trace the legislative journey of forest laws and their impact on tribal people 4. To find out the future implication of new forest law in protecting the rights of the tribal people

Recent forest expansion in Thailand: a methodological artifact?

Several Asian developing countries recently reported a net increase in forest cover. In Thailand, such reports have been vehemently rejected by forest officials, researchers, politicians, and international organizations alike. According to the dominant interpretation, the apparent forest regrowth derives from a methodological artifact. While the determination of the true evolution of forest cover has important implications, this interpretation has never been subject to scrutiny. This article presents a broad range of data and analyses suggesting important flaws in this interpretation. Based notably on (1) a critical review of available forest statistics and the methodology used to produce these statistics, (2) case study material from northern Phetchabun Province, and (3) an analysis of recent sub-national remote-sensing surveys, we reject the dominant interpretation of official statistics and suggest that reforestation has increased in Thailand and plausibly became the overall trend in the late 1990s.

The Measure Against Yezo Deer in the Hokkaido Regional Forest Office

The Measure Against Yezo Deer in the Hokkaido Regional Forest Office

The Use of VHSR Imagery for Wildland Fire Prevention: Application to Land-Clearing Management in the South of France

Every year, the French Mediterranean area is subject to wildland fires. The prevention policy promotes the major role of forest layout, for which it is necessary to build appropriate facilities such as reducing ignition and fire propagation risks near the borders of roads and tracks, creating forest tracks to allow firefighters to move safely through the forest during a fire, creating fuel breaks in order to divide up forests and limit the propagation of fire. Land-clearing along a forest track consists in creating discontinuity between the herbaceous stratum and the tree stratum by eliminating the shrubby stratum and cutting tree crowns. It avoids fire propagation by convection, and enables firefighters to deal with the fire in safety. The main difficulty for forest officers is to identify an optimized method to select appropriate tracks to clear, because it is impossible to clear all the tracks each year. Remote sensing tools would seem to be particularly useful for obtaining the best strategic and economic overview of forest tracks at departmental scale. This theme “land-clearing evaluation method” was selected as a target application for the images derived from the new Pleiades sensors: products and services required by end users. The objective of this work is to assess the real potentiality of such Very High Spatial Resolution (VHSR) imagery for land-clearing management. The methodology used consists in image classification and spatial analysis in order to extract land-clearing quality, and also evaluation of land-clearing quality based on field questionnaires validated through interactions with firefighters and rangers. The development of this methodology and its application to QuickBird images-used as Pleiades data simulations-successfully showed that VHSR Imagery is useful for preventing fire risk. It seems to be a good perspective for providing operational mapping services to help land-clearing management.

Chaucer the Forester:

Chaucer the Forester:

Institutional Arrangement to Forestry Development in the South-Western Nigeria

This paper examines the institutional arrangement and their impacts on forestry development in South-western Nigeria. Primary data were collected from all the forest officers in charge of the 31 forestry administrative zones in the six states in the Nigerian south west, namely: Ekiti (four); Lagos (five); Ogun (four); Ondo (eight); Osun (six) and Oyo (four).One forest officer from each of the six state headquarters were interviewed using structured questionnaires. The data were analysed using Descriptive statistics and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (D). Results revealed that the institutional arrangement investigated in the Nigerian South-west have significant relationship (P< 0.01) with forestry development. These include regular staff training, planning unit, log control and finance. Although the state forestry service in South-western Nigeria had good institutional arrangement on ground, their execution was slow and haphazard due to inadequate funding and manpower availability and training. Key words: Institutional Arrangement, Log control, Planning unit, funding, forest service

TRAINED AND COMPETENT PERSONNEL - A PREREQUISITE FOR SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT

The Forestry Sector Master plan is an ambitious programme for sustainable development to meet wide-ranging economic, social and environmental objectives. Its successful implementation depends on it being carried out by a body of well trained, competent personnel at all levels - professional, technical and operative. A university degree should be regarded only as the starting point for a career as a professional forester. Continuous professional development is necessary for the forest officer cadre to handle the many duties placed upon it. Training of technical foresters should be strongly practically orientated. Knowledge and competence are equally important, and trainees should be assessed on their ability to carry out practical tasks to specified performance levels. Basic skills training for operatives, whether employees or owner occupiers, should be made available through extension services both on-the-job and as short courses. This is particularly relevant for the successful development of participatory and private forestry. It is vital that all personnel know clearly the job they have to do, and can carry it out with minimal supervision to an acceptable output and level of accuracy. The encouragement of such individual responsibility will require better incentives than currently exist, with no rigid promotion barriers for outstanding individuals. The structure of forestry education and training in Sri Lanka will need to evolve to meet new demand. A wide range of training provision will be necessary, particularly in short courses, across the whole sector. A national forestry training council should be established to coordinate this activity.

The Institutional Design and Effectiveness of Timber Benefit Sharing under Joint Forest Management in Madhya Pradesh, India

This paper explores the institutional design of timber benefit sharing under the Joint Forest Management (JFM) policy and its effectiveness as an incentive for forest protection in Madhya Pradesh, India. Institutional analysis and case studies including household surveys for five committees were carried out. Except for plantations newly created under JFM, the places and times of timber harvesting were determined solely by the state forest department according to the division-level working plan. The sharing of the monetary benefits was determined by the state government and paid in equal amounts to committees in a lump sum, without taking the committees’ differing degrees of performance into consideration. Except in one committee, only a few respondents knew about the benefit sharing. In a committee where the shared benefits had been paid, even though little collective action had taken place, the money was used without communal decisions. It was confirmed that benefit sharing from timber production in Madhya Pradesh had not been implemented with flexible calculation and payment systems based on local people’s involvement in the decision-making process. Information provided by the concerned forest officers was the only way to motivate local people, and yet the appropriate information provisions were not likely to be in place. At the very least, improvements in the information provision with a change in the forest officers’ perceptions and attitudes are desirable.

Constraints to Forest Policy Implementation in the Southwest Nigeria: Causes, Consequences and Cure

There are many hindrances to effective implementation of the forest policy in the South-Western Nigeria. This paper examines the constraints to forest policy implementation in the South-Western Nigeria and their impacts on forest development. Primary data were collected in the six States in Southwestern Nigeria. The States were stratified into thirty one Forestry Administrative Zones viz: Ekiti, 4; Lagos, 5; Ogun 4; Ondo, 8; Osun, 6; and Oyo, 4. One forest officer in charge of each zone and one in charge of each State headquarter were selected to give 37 Forest Officers. In addition, 10% registered timber contractors (94), registered sawmillers (167); plank sellers (115); and villagers within and outside the chosen forest reserves (97) totaling 510 respondents were randomly selected for enumeration using structured questionnaires. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Chi-square (χ 2 ) at 0.01 level of significance. Constraints identified include: illegal felling and poaching (χ 2 = 333.74, p<0.01), lack of effective supervision and coordination (χ 2 = 28.72, p<0.01), in- adequate information from the policy makers (X 2 = 109.84, p<0.01), lack of complementary roles by all forestry stakeholders (χ 2 =84.03, p<0.01, non-encouragement of private forest plantation (χ 2 =36.28, p<0.01) and undefined forestry programmes (χ 2 =17.69, p<0.01) but with a low degree of dependence (V=0.27). In conclusion, it is recommended that if the on-going deforestation, forest depletion and degradation are to be curbed, it is essential to have a proactive and forward-looking poli- cies anticipating economic, social and environmental changes to guide the development of the forest sector.

Forest Governance in a Changing World: Reconciling Local and Global Values

There has been intense international debate on the governance of forests, in particular tropical forests. This has been driven by contrasting pressures from conservation and human rights groups, respectively calling for global values to prevail so as to protect biodiversity and reduce climate change, or for freedom of choice that empowers local people with the right to manage their own forests. Both sides have condemned irresponsible behaviour by forest officials and political actors, and highlighted the harmful impacts of disregard for the law. However, these normative approaches to forest governance have coincided with a fundamental re-examination of the objectives that societies have for their forest resources. The debate is not only about legality, but also about the legitimacy of forest laws and institutions. This review explores the divergence of views on long-term goals for forests and the implications for their governance. It emphasises that the real challenge is to reconcile the management of forests for values that accrue at different spatial and temporal scales. Forest governance needs to adapt, moving away from a framework based upon the neatly defined boundaries beloved of international organisations and treaties, and submitting to a constant process of adaptation and improvisation at a more local scale. The challenge is to find ways to aggregate such approaches into something that recognisably addresses the global values of forests and forest landscapes. Commonwealth countries have a wide range of forest conditions and are innovating with a range of governance options that provide lessons of potentially wide application.

P1-41 The influence of forest landscape design on human-tick contact as an effort to prevent exposure to tick-borne diseases

BackgroundReducing exposure to ticks is currently the most effective method of prevention of Lyme borreliosis, which appears to pose a new public health problem in heavily urbanised areas. The analysis...

Forests and chases in Wales and the Welsh Marches: an exploration of their origins and characteristics

Lords of forests and chases had exclusive rights to hunt and to preserve wild animals and vegetation across not only their own land, but also common land and property used by other people for all other purposes. As common-pool resource systems devoted primarily to non-economic ends, forests and chases are anathematised in narratives of the origins and progress of profit-seeking modernity and the democratic circumscription of arbitrary sovereign power. In Wales and the Marches they have been almost completely neglected and treated as synonymous with woodlands. Welsh law did not warrant exclusive hunting preserves for rulers, but Anglo-Norman invaders avidly created them. They were just as thick on the ground and as well-protected as in medieval England – indeed, perhaps more so and for longer, as hunting retained great symbolic significance for Welsh inhabitants and Anglo-Norman lords, and neither the Charter of the Forest, which enabled disafforestation, nor forest eyres, objection to which motivated it, applied to Wales and the Marches, where noble forest lords, forest officers and forest commoners had strong vested interests in their continuance into and through early-modern times. Much more research is needed to discover the number, extent and survival of these distinctive expressions of pre-modern attitudes, institutions and behaviours, and their contribution to the present landscape.

The Chepang and forest conservation in the central mid-hills of Nepal

This study was carried out in Wards 3 and 4 of Shaktikhor Village Development Committee (VDC), which forms a bottleneck in the Barandavar forest that connects the Chitwan National Park with the Mahabharat Range (mid-hills) in the north. The intent was to analyse the Chepang indigenous community, their dependency and pressure on the forest, their traditional management methods, the potential for community-based forest management and other related issues. The study method included open-ended interviews with four District Forest Office (DFO) staff, 15 key informants, a socio-economic survey of 250 households, data collection on household consumption of forest products and an analysis of land cover changes from the years 1970 and 2000. Chepangs were found highly dependent on a forest whose area has decreased by 12%, resulting in a reduction in species used by the Chepang for their livelihoods. Economic development based on non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has potential to decrease forest dependency and help conservation but the oligopoly (a limited number of suppliers and sellers) nature of the market, policyrelated problems and limited DFO technical staff has prevented people from enjoying NTFP-based economic benefits. The Chepang traditional management practice was found to be environmentally friendly but at times of increased population pressure on the forest these traditions broke down. Lack of trust between Chepangs and non-Chepangs, and the absence of mediation from the DFO obstructed the formation of community organizations to manage the forest.

VULNERABILITY OF THE SUNDARBANS DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN BANGLADESH

This study endeavors to decipher the possible affects on the Sundarbans due to rapid climate change by reviewing the existing literature, interviews with experts and forest officials and FGD with different stakeholders. Increase in salinity, sea level rise natural calamities etc. are the main vulnerabilities of the Sundarbans.&#x0D;

Social Capital and Joint Forest Management: People, Forest Conservation and Participatory Development: Three Case Studies from Karnataka, India

Social Capital and Joint Forest Management: People, Forest Conservation and Participatory Development: Three Case Studies from Karnataka, India

The Snow Angel and Other Imprints

This article, written in the form of an untimely academic novella is a text, which explores academic authoring as thinking and writing practice in a place called Sweden. The aim is on inquiries of geographical space, place, and academia, and the interrelation between the social and symbolic formation of class, gender and whiteness. The novella uses different writing strategies and visual representations such as documentary writing and photographing from the research process, letters to a friend, and memories from childhood, based on three generations of women's lives. The methodology can be described as a critical reflexive writing strategy inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, and additionally by methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, such as theorizing of letters, memory work, and narrative, and autobiographical approaches. In particular, it draws on work by the theorist critic and writer of fiction, Hélène Cixous, and the feminist author and theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drawing on interpretation of Cixous' essay “Enter the Theatre” and Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Characteristics of the untimely academic novella elaborate with possible forms of the symbolic, visual, and performative photographic and sensory in writing research; furthermore, time, social change, and unfinal endings play a pervasive role. It may be read as a story that situates and theorizes embodyment, landscape, and power through the interweaving of forest rural farming spaces and academic office spaces by tracing autobiographical imprints of an untimely feminist author. “The Snow Angel and Other Imprints” is the second article in a trilogy of untimely academic novellas. The first, with the title “The Professor's Chair,” was published in Swedish in 2007 (in the anthology “Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former,” (Eds.) Bränström Öhman &amp; Livholts), and forthcoming in English in the journal Life Writing 2010.

Economic Lives of People - A Case Study of Paluthan Community Forest Users in Dang District of Nepal

This study deals with the lives of people living in the area under Paluthan Community Forest User Group in Dang district. It looks at the economic aspect of their lives and the help the community forest has been able to provide to improve their livelihood. The primary data were collected through field visits, direct observations using a series of questionnaires, personal interviews and consultation with key informants. Similarly, the secondary data were obtained from reports and records from the community forest user group and service providers such as Livelihood Forestry Program (LFP) and District Forest Office, Dang. Through the study, it has been approximated that 17% of the annual household income is generated from the community forest and its user group.

Is Joint Forest Planning and Management Truly Joint? Understanding the Governance Question

This paper questions the true nature of the concept of ‘Joint’ in the Joint Forest Management programmes. Are Joint Forest Management programmes truly joint? A case study in a village in Shimoga district of Karnataka state suggests that ‘joint’ nature of the Joint Forest Planning and Management is only on papers and it is the experts or the concerned forest officials who call the shots, whether it is in planning or management (governance) of forests. The nature of joint which is supposed to be horizontal in nature is not truly so, it is more of a vertical relationship between the Forest Department at the top and the forest dependent communities at the bottom. At all the stages of implementation of the programme, it is the forest officials who have the upper hand, due to their ‘technical/scientific’ expertise, contrary to the idea that the traditional knowledge of the forest dependent communities needs to be utilized for the maximum benefit of the programme. The existing pattern has created a situation wherein the forest dependent communities are reduced to being mere beneficiaries instead of equal stakeholders/governors of the forest resources. The paper traces how such conditions can lead to disinterest among the forest dependent communities in managing forests and how it affects the governance and finally, conservation of forests.

Assessment of traditional rights, local interference and natural resource management in Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary

An assessment of human interference in Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (KWLS) showed huge dependence of local communities on forest fringes. KWLS is under active consideration as a national park because of its unique flora and fauna. Studies have evidenced habitat destruction and successional changes in the area because of ongoing unsustainable harvesting and logging. The present study provides an integrated approach towards evaluating resource extraction and management of the sanctuary. The study was based on in-depth semi-structured interviews and group discussions with local inhabitants of six villages and with forest officials. In addition, regeneration patterns and vegetation analysis was conducted in three land tenurial systems: community forest (CF), reserve forest (RF) and protected forest (PF). Key issues identified were wildlife offences, encroachment, pressure from unsustainable harvesting of resources and lack of livelihood opportunities. Ecological studies showed continuous change in regeneration patterns in forest patches/stands. The local survey stressed managing sanctuary fringes considering the village economy, social issues and resource requirements, and enhancing on-farm resource production to reduce pressure on forests. Forest personnel demanded more training on encroachment and poaching, these being major threats to biodiversity and bio-resources. Supporting and providing better livelihood opportunities is a viable option for minimizing pressure and managing biodiversity of the area through active community participation. This study generated useful outcomes and strategies for advancing policies to reduce pressure and overcome management constraints in the sanctuary.