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Rapid Silviculture Appraisal to Characterise Stand and Determine Silviculture Priorities of Community Forests in Nepal

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Abstract

Community forestry in Nepal is an example of a successful participatory forest management program. Developments in community forestry in four decades have focused on the social and governance aspects with little focus on the technical management of forests. This paper presents a silviculture description of community forests and provides silviculture recommendations using a rapid silviculture appraisal (RSA) approach. The RSA, which is a participatory technique involving local communities in assessing forests and silviculture options, is a simple and cost-effective process to gather information and engage forest users in the preparation of operational plans that are relevant to their needs. The RSA conducted on selected community forests in Nepal’s Mid-hills region shows that forests are largely comprised of dominant crowns of one or two species. The majority of studied community forests have tree densities below 500 stems per hectare as a consequence of traditional forest management practices but the quality and quantity of the trees for producing forest products are low. Silviculture options preferred by forest users generally are those which are legally acceptable, doable with existing capacities of forest users and generate multiple forest products. For sustainable production of multiple forest products, the traditional forest management practices have to be integrated with silviculture-based forest management system.

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Notes

  1. Operational plans, also known as work plans, are periodic plans of actions developed by the CFUGs and officially approved by district forest offices (DFO). They specify the forest management objectives of the CFUGs and provides a detailed plan of actions to achieve those stated objectives including rules related to forest management, and utilization. The Forest Regulation (1995) and Community Forestry Guidelines (1995) provide specific content and process guidance for the operational plans.

  2. US $ 1 = NRs 100.

  3. EnLiFT Project is the short name of the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research funded project FST/2011/076 which is a research project aiming to enhance livelihood and food security through agroforestry and community forestry in Nepal.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) as project FST/2011/076. Details of the project and full list of partners can be found at http://aciar.gov.au/project/fst/2011/076. The authors would like to thank the independent reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Finally yet importantly, we thank the community forest users in Kavre and Lamjung who participated in the rapid silviculture appraisal and to Mr. Ganesh Ray and Mr. Chandra Man Dangol, District Forest Officers of Kavre and Lamjung Districts, respectively.

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Correspondence to Edwin Cedamon.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6, 7 and 8.

Table 6 Diversity of tree species on the six community forests
Table 7 Diversity of tree regeneration by species on the six community forests
Table 8 Diversity of non-tree vegetation by species on the six community forests

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Cedamon, E., Nuberg, I., Paudel, G. et al. Rapid Silviculture Appraisal to Characterise Stand and Determine Silviculture Priorities of Community Forests in Nepal. Small-scale Forestry 16, 195–218 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-016-9351-0

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