Landscapes Forest and Global Change - ESA - Escola Superior ...

Z.L. Urech & J.P. Sorg 2010. Taking into account local people’s livelihood systems for a better management of fragments
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Moreover, in our research area we found an important traditional rule concerning the right to
convert forest fragments into agricultural land. Only farmers being owners of the land
surrounding the forest fragments have the right to clear these forests. This is a crucial rule as it
is depending on the individual household whether a fragment will be cleared or not. Therefore
we asked households which still have forest fragments situated next to their agricultural
territories why they did not clear their fragment until this day. Figure 2 indicates the obvious
changing interest for forest fragments with increasing distance to the massif. Households near
the massif see fragments mainly as a soil reserve for future conversion into agricultural land.
Interesting is that this can not be a question of land availability, as households near the massif
have around twice as much available agricultural land per households as families far from the
massif do. Thus households far from the massif should be more interested in forest conversion,
but they do not seem to be. Households far from the massif are more interested in the goods
produced by forest fragments.
Therefore our conclusion suggests that the perception of the importance of forest fragments
changed with increasing scarcity of forest resources. On the one hand, people living far from the
massif notice the growing concurrence on products from forested landscapes. On the other hand
they have already been aware that forests are disappearing and are exhaustible. People near the
massif generally think that forests are inexhaustible and they still have more than enough to
satisfy their principal needs related to forests.
Near massif
Far massif
Figure 2: Reasons for the preservation of forest fragments
3.2 Changing importance of forests for income
In this section we explore the importance of forested landscapes more through the lense of
monetary income resulting from forest products (see Table 1). Especially during periods of rice
shortage, households are strongly depending on alternative income to buy food. Then, logging
and timber transport become important sources of income. Farmers living near the forest massif
still find precious wood in the massif, whereas farmers living far from the forest massif have to
find wood in the surrounding fragments, where precious woods are already becoming scarce.
Nevertheless, as shown in Figure 3, farmers living far from the massif have the higher income
by timber activities than farmer living near the massif (Analysis of variance: F 3, 102 = 2.86, P =
0.040).
Forest Landscapes and Global Change-New Frontiers in Management, Conservation and Restoration. Proceedings of the IUFRO Landscape Ecology
Working Group International Conference, September 21-27, 2010, Bragança, Portugal. J.C. Azevedo, M. Feliciano, J. Castro & M.A. Pinto (eds.)
2010, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Bragança, Portugal.