The role of enclosures on the diversity and productivity of rural landscapes in North Gondar
Abstract
The demand for arable land, pasture, timber and fuel has caused extreme deforestation in the Northern highlands of Ethiopia. Remnants of the original forests are confined around churches and monasteries. The lack of regeneration in many of these remnant forests poses a serious threat on the maintenance of genetic diversity in the highlands of Ethiopia. This has also serious consequences on the livelihood of people: increased shortage of woody biomass for fuel led to use of dung and crop residue. This in turn creates mining of the already depleted nutrients from the soil and depressed agricultural productivity. The cumulative outcome has been very low performance in the crop and livestock sector as commercial inorganic fertilizer and animal feed are beyond the financial reach of the majority of the households. Exclosures have been proved and recommended for effective soil restoration, re-colonization, natural regeneration and increasing diversity of native flora even without sowing or planting provided that increased competition of tree seedlings with grasses as well as altered disturbance regimes with higher risks for fire are managed. The use of enclosures, however, has not been intensified in North Gondar. The problem has been compounded as the villagers lack materials for fencing (such as wooden poles). In this project, different implementation strategies for bringing trees to farms will be tested. Three types of exclosures, live fences and live hedges, the use of nurse shrubs and mobile exclosures will be tested in a participative process with the land users. Natural regeneration strategies as the cheapest and most adaptive strategy to enhance tree density in the landscape will be used as well. For this, knowledge on seed dispersal distances and seed dispersal strategies is crucial. Therefore, seed dispersal distances will be studied for the most important tree species. Based on this, maximum distances of exclosures for establishment of forest patches as stepping stones for natural regeneration will be characterized.
keywords Ethiopia Agroforestry Exlosures Tree dispersal Participative methods
Publikationen
Project staff
Georg Gratzer
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Georg Gratzer
georg.gratzer@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-91215
Project Leader
01.03.2009 - 01.12.2011