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Community Perception and Management of Ecosystem Services in a Protected Area in Kashmir Himalaya

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Abstract

It is vital to integrate local communities’ perception of ecosystem services (ES) into the management planning of protected areas. We investigated community perceptions of a broad range of ES in the Overa-Aru Wildlife Sanctuary, a designated protected area in Kashmir Himalaya. We conducted focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with selected respondents from five villages inside and around the Sanctuary. We used the Likert scale to evaluate responses. The respondents identified a range of ES furnished by the Sanctuary, with provisioning services being the most important (47.82%) and regulating and cultural services of less but equal importance (26.09% each). In terms of tangible benefits of provisioning services, all the respondents were satisfied with forest and agro-ecosystems (100% respondents). Based on the indicators used to assess the ecological health of the Sanctuary, all respondents supported improvements such as increase in areas of dense forest. Overall, respondents were satisfied with the governmental agencies monitoring biodiversity and supply of drinking water, but not with natural forest regeneration. We found significant variation in community perceptions of ES, revealing relative heterogeneity among the respondents of the surveyed villages. Our results reveal that a suite of ecosystem services furnished by the Sanctuary are valued by the villagers for their basic livelihood requirements. Maintenance of these ES are crucial in achieving regional and global goals of sustainability. Based on our findings, we suggest policy recommendations for the managers of the Sanctuary to develop ES-integrated management strategies that may have more general applications in similar circumstances elsewhere.

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Data Availability

The primary data used in this manuscript is available as supplementary material—I, II, III and IV.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Head, Department Botany, University of Kashmir. We acknowledge the generous support of our colleagues at BIOTA Laboratory, Centre for Biodiversity & Taxonomy, University of Kashmir during our study. We also thank all the participants for sharing their valuable knowledge. We thank the Department of Wildlife Protection, Jammu & Kashmir Government for permission to conduct our study. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have greatly improved quality of the manuscript.

Funding

Tajamul Islam acknowledges the University Grants Commission (UGC) under 924/(CSIRNET JUNE-2019) for providing financial assistance as a Junior Research Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Biodiversity & Taxonomy, Department of Botany, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K, 190006, India

    Tajamul Islam & Anzar Ahmad Khuroo

  2. Plant Reproductive Biology, Genetic Diversity and Phytochemistry Research Laboratory, Department of Botany, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K, 190006, India

    Tajamul Islam & Irshad A. Nawchoo

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  1. Tajamul Islam
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Contributions

Tajamul Islam: Curation and analysis; Data collection; Methodology; Software; Visualization; Writing-Original draft; Revision. Irshad A. Nawchoo: Conceptualization; Investigation; Supervision; Validation; Writing-review. Anzar Ahmad Khuroo: Conceptualization; Methodology; Supervision; Validation; Writing-Original draft; Revision.

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Correspondence to Anzar Ahmad Khuroo.

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Ethics Approval and Informed Consent

We followed the guidelines for interviewing and data collection devised by Human Research Ethics Committees (https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/research-policy/ethics/human-research-ethics-committees). Informed consent was obtained verbally before each interview to clearly state the objectives of the study and to obtain consent to participate. Each interviewee was assured beforehand of confidentiality, and of his/her right to withdraw from participation at any time, and of the objective of scientific publication.

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Islam, T., Nawchoo, I.A. & Khuroo, A.A. Community Perception and Management of Ecosystem Services in a Protected Area in Kashmir Himalaya. Hum Ecol 51, 769–779 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-023-00439-4

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