Resource Assessment of Non-Wood Forest Products: Experience and Biometric Principles

Abstract

Forest managers increasingly recognize that management of non-wood forest product (NWFP) harvesting is important for conserving biological diversity and sustaining human use of forests. Importantly, many of these products, and the forests they grow in, are integral to the persistence of indigenous cultures. Similarly, rural communities are more likely to support forest conservation or longer timber rotations if they can annually harvest and market products derived from local forests. Managing NWFP resources poses a daunting task, however, because such products are numerous and diverse; the organisms that produce them differ widely in form, abundance, distribution, and autecology; and harvesting typically occurs in a complex social, economic, political, land tenure, and forest management context. Nevertheless, forest managers, researchers, development workers, harvesters, and affected local communities agree that assessing the status of, and changes in, resource abundance is central to sustainable NWFP management.