English 2.28MB - Center for International Forestry Research

| Characterization of land types
Summary
The flora of Khe Tran exhibits high species richness, and although our sampling
was not exhaustive, it is sufficiently rigorous to address the value and relative
richness of remaining natural forests as well as other land types. It also shows
that the potentially monotonous land types, such as plantations or rice fields, are
still very high in non-tree diversity in Khe Tran, which enables and maintains
their multiuse function.
According to this survey, the people of Khe Tran represent no imminent
threat for recorded endangered species. We recommend that information on
threatened species be given to villagers to raise the awareness of conservation
needs and that the specific uses of especially threatened species be discussed
in order to give people the option to choose other species for these uses. It
seems likely that the range of threats from cutting of construction material
and collection of firewood and material for basketry may have contributed to
the status of plant species in the past, but the impact at present is difficult to
assess. Direct impact on forest cover or composition as a whole is impossible to
quantify based on our sampling. Therefore further research on sustainability of
NTFP collection is required. Most of the natural vegetation is disturbed forest
or shrub lands and the impacts of floods and fires continue to influence forest
cover and structure. The most substantive influence on remaining forests may
be the way of planning and measure of recognising the outside effect on land
types. During the fieldwork we saw many people coming from elsewhere to
collect NTFPs and some marks of illegal logging conducted by people from
outside the area.