Parks as a Mechanism to Maintain and Facilitate Recovery of Forest Cover: Examining Reforestation, Forest Maintenance and Productivity in Uganda

Abstract

Protected areas serve as the primary mechanism for purposeful biodiversity conservation across the globe. Kibale National Park in western Uganda illustrates a common trend in protected area landscapes, where we find reforestation or forest maintenance occurring in regions otherwise surrounded by rapid population growth, increasing agricultural intensity, and associated land and resource pressures. As such many forested parks in Africa are effectively ecological islands within very human dominated, agricultural landscapes. Research has revealed Kibale National Park to be a relative success story in the region. Park boundaries and forest cover have remained relatively intact or increased since the Kibale Forest was elevated to national park status in 1993, while the smaller forest fragments in the surrounding landscape have become smaller and more isolated. However, early landscape-level analyses suggest that forest productivity is decreasing inside the park, even as reforestation is occurring, which highlights the need to address not only quantity but also quality of forest cover within such studies of forest cover change. This chapter will also highlight some of the methodological techniques which need to be incorporated into studies of land cover change, especially when dealing with issues of reforestation and forest quality, which is of major concern within the forest transition literature. We will also discuss the use of parks as a critical tool in forest cover maintenance.