Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
be difficult to define in practice: what is
'high' biodiversiy? W.A.R.].
Management: there will be no exploitaion or
disturbance of natural forest or wildlife.
Ameniy Zone.
Aims: This zone is to allow the use of unusual
topographic or natural features for
educaion, recreaion and research.
managed for either more producion or more
catchment objecives.
Areas considered to be of exreme importance
for biological resource conservaion should be
managed as 'core zones' free from disturbance,
and given the legal basis which prevents disturb-
ance, i.e. Naional Park status. Easten Africa is
sill only slowly moving from an early idea that
Parks are places for visitors to look at animals!
In Tanzania today there is increasing realis-
aion of the essenial role of forest cover in main-
taining water flow, and the understanding that
overuse of forest resources can lead to watershed
degradaion, and even to large-scale landslides,
mudlows, and flooding and siltaion problems,
such as has recently happened in Mbeya Region.
One answer is to ban all orms of eploitaion
from the forests O. Holmes, personal communi-
caion, 1989). In pracice this will be dificult to
implement unless adequate altenaive forest
resources are provided in plantaions and village
or homestead woodlots. Careful forest mapping
and planning should be able to demarcate buffer
zones where legiimate exploitaion can be
regulated and key core zones or fragile sites where
all eploitaion should be stopped. Sayer (1991),
Oldfield (1987), Howard (1991) and Wood
(1990) discuss buffer zones in forested regions in
different parts of the tropics. A number of recent
iniiaives in India and Southeast Asia have shown
the great success that can be achieved in increas-
ing buffer zone producivity by joint management
or paricipatory management by local people
(Chambers
&
Leach, 1990; Poffenberger 1990a,
b).
Management: this will depend on specific
objectives. There will be no commercial
eploitation. Visitor faciliies will be
developed.
Producive Zone.
Aims: This zone is to allow the sustainable
producion of imber and other forest
products, in areas of the reserves not
included in the other zones.
Management: Exploitaion will be permitted
according to rules of selecive harvesing.
There will be no mechanical logging.
Exploited areas will be regenerated as per
standard pracices.
One component of zonaion theory is the core-
buffer concept, where a biologically important
core zone is given extra protecion by the presence
of a peripheral buffer zone where resource exploi-
taion is permitted. The buffer absorbs people
pressure, and management should be directed
towards maintaining that capacity to absorb press-
ure by, for example, plantaions of fuel, fodder,
imber rees, etc. The bufer zone has two roles:
one is this social buffer, to allow people access to
resources; the other is extension buffering, allow-
ing core zone wildlife populaions to spill over into
larger areas, possibly acing as a gene flow cor-
ridor between two core zones (Saharia, 1985).
The plantaion of naive and exoic fuelwood
trees around Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda is a
good example of a peripheral buffer zone. We
proposed the same for the easten margins of an
Uzungwa Mountains Naional Park (Rodgers
&
Hall, 1985). Weber (1987) discusses possible
socioecological inputs into the management of
mountain forests of great biological values. Buffer
zones could be of Forest Reserve status, intenally
Improved management of the natural oress
FAO (1982b) stated that only a small proporion
of Tanzania's forests is intensively managed, with
in-date working plans. These were the com-
mercially producive forests and plantaions.
Regular staff establishments of unworked natural
forests do not permit adequate management, nor
even adequate protection. A first step in improved
management must be the provision of sufficient
numbers of field staff, supervisory staff and facili-
ies to protect the resource from illegal entry,
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