Comparison of Environmental Richness in Natural Forest and Home Gardens: A Case Study from Nachchaduwa Catchment (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Environment, Ecology, Family and Urban Studies (IJEEFUS), 2017
Loss of biodiversity is one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our time. This study assessed tree diversity and population structure in the homegarden land use of Mawsmai village, located on degraded karst landscape in East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, India. The 1667 m 2 sampled area of the village homegarden land use harbored 21 tree species. Tree density was reported to be 342 individuals ha-1. Most of the trees belonged to families that are common to the neighboring forest land. Homegarden land use was found to have the potential to conserve plant diversity on the degraded karst landscape along with improving food security.
ENVIRONMENTAL RICHNESS IN THE DRY ZONE HOMEGARDENS
With increasing demand for fuel wood and timber and the growing concern on environmental protection, planners and implementers of the watershed and rural development projects are mindfully concentrating their efforts on tree planting programs. Success of the program must be monitored and evaluated not only on productivity but also on the impact of it on environmental protection. In assessing tree planting programmes the latter can be assessed through an index termed ‘Environmental Richness of Plant Community (ERPC)’. The index (ERPC) should emphasize three main aspects. They are plant diversity, stratal coverage and plant density. The objective of this paper is to introduce the above environmental assessment index (ERPC), classify existing dry zone home gardens on the basis of environmental richness, nature of variation of the index among dry zone home gardens, and make recommendations for the plant composition of home gardens to be environmentally rich. The ERPC can be defined as; ERPC = S (kLNL + kMNM + kSNS), where S is the number of species per 100 m2, kL, kM and kS are coefficients to denote stratal effect of large, medium and small trees and NL, NM and NS are number of plants per 100 m2 under large, medium and small canopy categories. The study was carried out by surveying 51 home gardens in the central dry zone of Sri Lanka. The results indicated that the environmental richness decreases exponentially as the home garden size increases. A high environmental richness level was found in 20 percent of the home gardens. In these home gardens average number of plants per 100 m2 was 2.9, 6.3 and 6.7 under large, medium and small canopy categories respectively. Average number of species per 100 m2 found in environmentally rich home gardens was 0.6, 1.2 and 1.1 under same canopy categories. Results also revealed that in reality all criteria which determine the environmental richness are low in environmentally poor home gardens and vis-a-vis. This indicates that for a home garden to become environmentally rich improvement must be made simultaneously to increase both plants and species densities with an approximate ratio of 1:2:2 among large, medium and small canopy types respectively. This approach can be used to assess any plant community on its environmental richness and improve accordingly.
Species richness from cropland to forest in Ghunsa valley, eastern Himalaya
Objective: Species richness is the number of total species present in an ecological community which is widely used to measure biodiversity. The main aim of this study was to study variation in species richness along land use types, from cropland to forest. Methods: This study was carried out in Ghunsa valley, Kanchenjungha Conservation Area of Eastern Himalaya during 2012. Four land use types, namely cropland, meadow, exploited forest and natural forest were selected at each of five elevational bands starting from 2,200 m above sea level at Sekathum to 3,800 m asl at Rambuk kharka, Taplejung. A total of 70 transects, having 25 m × 2.5 m size, were laid and the vascular plant species found within each transect were recorded twice. Results: Altogether 360 species of vascular plants belonging to 257 genera and 95 families have been documented. Among them, 25 species belongs to pteridophytes, 7 species of gymnosperms and 328 species of angiosperms. One-way ANOVA showed the total species richness (including all groups) was significantly different (F 3, 66 = 7.494, p=0.000) in different land use types. Conclusion: Species richness was significantly different in different land use types. Species richness was found highest in exploited forest.