| Abstract | Despite wide spread interest and general concern for sustainable forest products in
community based managed forests, many interested parties are ill-equipped to judge if
the concerned community forests could sustainably produce forest products such as
wood (timber and firewood) to meet the requirement of local need. The assessment of
the sustainability of forest management practices in natural tropical forests, particularly
under communal management regimes, designed for production of timber and wood
multiple products is a particularly vexing problem due to the lack of stand structure,
growth and yield data.
The present study is seeking to explore about the growth and community management
of natural pine forest, particularly the existing rate consumption, harvest of and
perceptions of local communities towards Pinus kesiya wood products and forest. Ban
Nanou of Muang Peak district, Xiengkhouang province, which has considerable natural
pine forest in their territory were selected as the study site. In order to evaluate the
likely long-term effects of existing management practices on· the forest condition, a
diameter class growth model was developed and used for all the 3 different forest types
(based on stand density class) found in the study area. In the study, stand-level
sustainability was used to measure the sustainability of the study forest.
The condition of the pine forest in the study village was variable. The numbers of
stems per hectare found in the open and medium forest types are equal to only one
fourth (25 %) and one half (50 %) respectively to the total stem number of the dense
forest types. Within a same density class, the number of stems per hectare was initially
decreasing very fast then gradually slowdown through the increased in age class. The
decrease typically followed the so-call "3/2 law of self-thinning". The forest types that
have the highest standing over bark (ob) volume per hectare were mature and old
dense forest types, which have 113 m3 and 181 m3 of standing ob volume per hectare
respectively. The forest types that have the lowest standing volume of only 21 m3 per
hectare were the young open and pole open forest types.
From the study it was found that recruitment was very important to the stand
sustainability and long-term yield and the partial periodical cutting of the stand was
very essential if the yield of the stand to be increased
The amount of total annual wood consumption per household was estimated to be at
the level of 13.37 m3 (with a range from 4.66 to 26.36 m3), and this made the average
annual per capita wood consumption in the study area was 1.88 m3
, which was sixty
three percent higher than the national average (1.15 m3
). Out of the .total amount of
wood consume by household, 1.26, 1.33, 1.93 and 8.95 m3 were used for house
building, house repair, pole and fencing and fuelwood respectively. With a total
population of 522 inhabitants in 81 households, the total annual wood consumption of
the village, were estimated to be at the level of 1083 m3
. Among all use categories,
fuel wood was the most important one, accounted to more than 66 % of the total wood
consumption. Other categories such as fencing materials, house repairs and house
construction represented only at the rate of 14, 10 and 10 % respectively. It is noticed that the amount of fuelwood and total wood consumption in the
household were not at all depended on ethnicity, but on family number and household
income. Fuelwood consumption has strong and positive relationships with both
household income and the number of persons in the family. Whereas, the amount of
total consumption has only a medium and weak positive relationships with household
income and the number of persons in the family respectively. Concerning to the
people's perception, it was found that in general, the view ·of local people towards pine
forest was very positive and ethnicity, age, occupation and household income variables
had no any correlation ships with people's perceptions. Majority of the local villagers
preferred pine forest but having some broadleaved species in its composition. The ratio
of pine trees in this mixed forest that was· preferred by local villagers was ranging from
30 to 80 %. The reason for local people to select relatively pure pine and mixed
forests as their ideal forests was because these forests could produce products and
services that were needed by them.
Hence in order to maintain and increase the sustainability and productivity of
community forests, it is recommended to pay more attention to the management of
khasi pine and fuelwood forests at the local level and also pointed out the need to
introduce new silvicultural and management practice such as negative selection cutting
and thinning regime for mature and young pine stands respectively and harvest
techniques that reduced post-logging damages. Necessary policy, implementation and
research actions and measures that were required to be undertaken to improve the
productivity and sustainability of community forests were also been given. |