Abstracto

Patterns of Biodiversity in State Managed and Community Based Forest Management Categories of Terai Arc Landscape, Nepal

Ram Prasad Lamsal, Dr. Sanjay Nath Khanal, Dr. Keshav Raj Kanel

This study was carried out in 147 forest units of seven sites of Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) in 2009 and 2012 to analyse and compare the structure of biodiversity within community based forest management (CBM) and state managed systems (SMS) and investigate the relationship among biodiversity indices. For each of these management modes, we simultaneously analysed 24 indices that are theoretically complementary and relate to number of species, evenness and diversity. Principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation and multiple regression analysis (MLRA) were carried out to investigate empirical relationships between the selected indices. Under landscape level conservation, CBM has been found significantly better than SMS on diversity indices. The results confirmed that instead of using PCA and MLRA separately, use of factor score of PCA in MLRA can offer a good opportunity for developing and predicting model or equations on performance of biodiversity without multicollinearity problem.