Composition of forests and vegetation in the Kailash Sacred Landscape, Nepal
- PDF / 3,997,007 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 71 Downloads / 179 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Composition of forests and vegetation in the Kailash Sacred Landscape, Nepal Ripu Mardhan Kunwar1 • Maria Fadiman1 • Tobin Hindle1 • Madan Krishna Suwal2 Yagya Prasad Adhikari3 • Kedar Baral4 • Rainer Bussmann5
•
Received: 17 May 2018 / Accepted: 18 March 2019 Ó Northeast Forestry University 2019
Abstract A total of 141 quadrats were sampled using stratified random sampling to study forest, environment and human interactions along an elevation gradient 1800 to 3665 m at the remote Kailash Sacred Landscape, Nepal. Eight forest types were identified, including Laurel-Oak to Rhododendron to Blue pine, comprising 191 species including 60 useful from 166 genera and 87 families. The environmental variables elevation, slope, and temperature were significant (p \ 0.001) in determining the composition and distribution of forest types. Records of large numbers of useful plants along with diverse forest and vegetation types suggest a strong association between the
culture of local villages and nature conservation. Due to changes in climate, socio-culture and land-use, forest degradation is expected to accelerate, thus forcing government and indigenous community forest management measures to acknowledge human, cultural and environmental variables for sustainable forest management. Keywords Phyto-sociological assessment Environmental factors Forest types Culture Kailash Sacred Landscape Nepal
Introduction Project funding: The project was partially funded by Rufford Foundation, UK (Grant # 21198-2, 25296-B) and Florida Atlantic University, USA (GT-001801). The online version is available at https://www.springerlink.com. Corresponding editor: Zhu Hong.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-019-00987-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Ripu Mardhan Kunwar [email protected] 1
Department of Geosciences, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA
2
Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Fosswinckelsgate 6, P.O. Box 7802, 5020 Bergen, Norway
3
Department of Biogeography, University of Bayreuth, Universita¨tsstr. 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany
4
Department of Forests, Kathmandu 44600, Nepal
5
Ilia State University, Kakutsa Cholokashvili Ave 3/5, 0162 Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
Humans have been present throughout the Nepal Himalayas since the Old-Stone Age (Corvinus 2004). A fossilized tooth of a Ramapithecus, an extinct group of primates, found in 1980 in the Tinau (Butwal), Western Nepal Himalaya, was dated as the second oldest in the world at 9.0–9.5 million years (Munthe et al. 1983) and documents prehistoric habitation in the western Nepal (Pradhan 1998). Wherever and whenever humans appeared, they altered the environment and burnt forests for their livestock, as they considered treeless rangelands easier to manage (Miehe et al. 2009). Early settlers (Aryans), advancing into the western parts of Nepal in 1100 AD are considered to be the first groups to e
Data Loading...
