The conservation of the forest resources of eastern Africa: past influences, present practices and future needs - Biogeography and Ecology of the Rain Forests of Eastern Africa - page 308

the National Parks legislation as a Forest Naional
Park!
Kenya has a complicated set of protected area
categories (IUCN, 1987). Naional Parks provide
the highest level of conservaion status. Naional
Reserve may allow compaible land uses other
than conservaion, such as grazing. These two
categories are administered by the Ministry of
Tourism and Wildlife. The Naional Park cate-
gory does have some forest area: the Aberdares,
Mount Elgon, Mount Kenya; although Naional
Reserves also have orest areas of conservaion
importance: Marsabit, Tana River Primate
Reserve, Shimba Hills. The Forest Deparment
has a category of 'Nature Reserves' which give a
higher conservaion status to areas within the
Forest Reserve estate. Examples are Arabuko-
Sokoke, Mau and Nandi.
This mulipliciy of categoy can lead to con-
fusion. Kakamega Forest, of extreme biological
value, has been a Forest Reserve (230 km2) since
1933. Part became a Nature Reserve (12 km2) in
1967. A Naional Park of97 km2 was proclaimed
in 1983, but was not legally gazetted, and a
Naional Reserve order was passed in 1985. The
area is sill heavily eploited (Kokwaro, 1988).
Some forest areas of great importance such as the
Taita Hills are sill unprotected (Beentje, 1988a)
although yet another category, 'Game Sanctuary',
supposedly safeguards the non-forest wildlife at
lower alitude.
The eising conservaion status is of great con-
cern on three disinct counts. First, there is
inadequate legal protecion. Secondly, there is
inadequate field protecion and management of
the eising protected areas, mainly of Forest
Reserve status. There are too few field staff to
prevent illegal exploitaion and to regulate legal
eploitaion. Today, their condiions of service in
Tanzania do not allow efficient work input.
Management inputs are rarely planned, biodiver-
sity conservaion is rarely a dominant objecive,
and resource status is not monitored. Research
into natural forest ecology and the wildlife of for-
ests is minimal. Resources are deterioraing. As
the following secions illustrate, recovery is poss-
ible, but it will require considerable invesment of
staf, inance and experise. Thirdly, there is the

quesion of management knowledge for what is
increasingly realised is a highly complex system
involving ecological and socioeconomic com-
ponents. Tradiional forest management texts do
not deal with people problems. There are no for-
est management textbooks for East African forest
situaions. A manual of basic forest pracice,
which will help ill this gap, is under preparaion
J. Holmes, personal communicaion, 1991).
General texts may offer some help, but rarely are
their guidelines of sufficient detail to offer exact
advice or suggesion for the young forest oficer.
Poore & Sayer's (1987) booklet on managing
ropical moist forest is an example; the manage-
ment of catchment forest gets one page. Buffer
zone management is discussed by Oldfield
(1987); here the case histories are of interest, but
again at a general level of applicability. There is a
need or much more documentaion on manage-
ment possibilities for the East African closed for-
est system.

he need or monitoring and inventoy of orest
resources

Conservaion planning requires knowledge of he
disribuion and numerical status of the resources.
'Where is this species located, how numerous is it,
and is the population status changing,' are necess-
ary pieces of inormaion. The inverse informa-
ion is also important: 'This forest has the
following species, at these densiies and their
status is declining.'
Unfortunately we do not possess this basic
informaion for most of our natural forest
resources. Recent surveys in the Usambara, Ulu-
guru and Uzungwa Mountains have all led to the
discovery of new taxa and new records of large
and conspicuous species (see, for example, several
chapters in this volume). The East Usambaras
may have the richest forests in terms of species
diversity in all tropical Africa. Forest cover is frag-
mented into 18 separate reserves. There is no
accurate vegetaion map of the area, no detailed
descripion of any forest block and no complete
plant species list for any one area. hite (in
Rodgers & Homewood, 1982a) lists some 30 tree
species as near endemics for the Usambaras, and