Rehabiltation and Sustainable Use of Degraded Community Forests : Management of Community Forests Towards Multiple Use

Conventional forest management practices emphasize the management of forests for the production of timber or other industrial forest products. In community forestry,communities expect wider range of products & services from their forests, which necessitates the development of management practices reflecting these needs. To this effect,silvicultural research in community forests has great importance to enhance the productivity of those forests & improve the livelihood of communities. Therefore, this work is a contribution towards development of simple & practical silvicultural management techniques that can be implemented using locally available facilities & capacities. The successful implementation of the proposed techniques in this book requires continous practical training both for members of the user groups and forest experts. Moreover, the proposed treatments need to be refined through repeated experimentation, monitoring, & re- adjustments. The establishment of demonstration and experimental plots will help to illustrate the procedures involved in the silvicultural treatments & to monitor their effects on the growth of the forests.