Protected Area Planning in the Tropics: Uganda's National System of Forest Nature Reserves

Abstract

Uganda is one of the most biologically diverse countries in Africa, with much of its biodiversity represented in a system of 10 national parks, 10 wildlife reserves, and 710 forest reserves, covering 33,000 km2 (14%) of the country's area. We focus on the role of the forest reserves in biodiversity conservation and describe a procedure we developed to design a national system of forest nature reserves. In the late 1980s a policy was instituted to dedicate half the area of forest reserves to sustainable timber production and the other half to environmental protection (with 20% as nature reserves). To select suitable sites, a 5‐year, US$1‐million program of biodiversity and resource assessment was undertaken, focusing on five biological indicator species groups and covering all the major forest reserves. Based on data generated by the field studies, we ranked each forest in terms of various criteria—(species richness, rarity, value for nonconsumptive uses, timber production, and importance to local communities)—and used an iterative site selection procedure to choose the most suitable combination of forests for nature reserve establishment. Our procedure maximized complementarity in representing species and habitats in reserves across the whole protected‐area system. We initially selected sites using purely biological criteria but later modified our procedure to ensure that opportunity costs and potential land‐use conflicts were minimized. Our preferred network of sites included 14 forests that, in combination with the existing national parks, would account for 96% of species represented in the country's protected areas. These 14 forests were classified as “prime” and “core” sites and were selected for the establishment of large nature reserves (averaging 100 km2). The addition of 25 smaller “secondary” forest nature reserves (averaging 32 km2) would protect more than 99% of the indicator species.

Parks, People and Pixels: Evaluating Landscape Effects of an East African National Park on its Surroundings

“…We used a digitized park boundary 2 We recorded standard training sample information [41] for a 3x3-Landsat TM pixel, or 90 m 2 areas, centered on randomly generated points created for the study region, and described the vegetation and general physical characteristics at each location, following a modified version of the Green et al (2005) [41] protocol. In addition, 150 3x3-pixel-sized training samples from inside KNP were collected in 2002-3 [42] and used for comparison with the surrounding-landscape measurements.…”

Drivers of species richness and abundance of butterflies in coffee–banana agroforests in Uganda

“…Due to their short life cycle, narrow niches and relatively low mobility, they are more sensitive to land-cover and land-use changes than long-lived animals. Butterflies are relatively easy to capture, manipulate and identify (Rogo and Odulaja 2001;Fitzherbert et al 2006;Marin et al 2009;Nyamweya and Gichuki 2010), which makes them important candidates for monitoring changes in habitat, biodiversity and environmental conditions (Kremen 1992;Howard et al 2000;Cleary 2004;Cleary and Mooers 2004), including the impact of landscape and habitat management practices and disturbance regimes in terrestrial ecosystems (Stork et al 2003;Öckinger and Smith 2008).…”

“…There are a few published papers quantitatively documenting the diversity of butterflies for some agricultural regions in East Africa. In Uganda, most of the works on butterflies have been carried out mainly in natural areas, forest ecosystems and in protected areas (Tumuhimbise et al 1998;Howard et al 2000;Molleman et al 2006;Tushabe et al 2006). There exist no published data describing extensively the diversity of butterflies found in agricultural landscapes in Uganda in relationship to climatic, regional, landscape and local drivers.…”

Assessment of the effectiveness of nature reserve management in China

“…According to the ''Report on the State of the Environment in China in 2008'' (State Environmental Protection Administration of China 2009), China had established 2,538 nature reserves with a total area of 1,489,430 km 2 by the time of the report. Protected areas are the cornerstones of most national strategies to conserve biodiversity (Howard et al 2000). To date, these nature reserves cover 85% of the terrestrial ecosystem types, 85% of the wild-animal species groups, more than 300 endangered wild-animal species, and major distribution regions for more than 130 valuable tree species in China (Ouyang et al 2002).…”