IFRI Multiple Benefits from Forest Commons
Description
IFRI research program is a network of collaborative research centres across North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe with a focus on case studies and analyses of local forest governance and forest resource outcomes in diverse socio‐political, ecological, and institutional contexts. IFRI sites are broadly representative of forests and the range of forest management regimes that exist in human‐dominated landscapes throughout the tropics (Congo Basin in Central Africa, Amazon Basin across nine Latin American countries, and Borneo across Indonesia and Malaysia). The dataset used for this analysis was drawn from the October 2018 compiled version of the full IFRI Database covering 1028 forests and villages in 26 countries. Our criteria for case selection excluded forests outside of the low‐income tropics, forests less than 5ha, and those with absent plot vegetation data. In cases where a forest had longitudinal data, we used the visit date with the most recent plot data available. These exclusions yielded a dataset of 314 forests in 15 countries located across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Biomass, Biodiversity & Livelihoods We tested for pairwise strength of associations between our three benefits – Biomass, Biodiversity, and Livelihoods and a set of explanatory variables: Forest Size, Elevation, Population, Literacy, Food self-consumption (average number of months that households consume self-produced food), Commercial Value, Distance to market, Presence of association (Yes/No), Rulemaking (participation of local communities in making formal rules regarding governance of the forest), and Illegal Harvesting (None to Rampant). For each forest commons in our data, forest vegetation and biophysical data was collected in ~30 plots of 10 meters radius randomly distributed across the forest. We calculated the basal area of trees with a diameter greater than 10 cm at breast height. We calculated the non‐parametric Chao1 estimator of tree species richness as a proxy indicator for overall forest biodiversity using EstimateS. We measure livelihood contributions of forest commons by an index extracted through factor analysis of the proportions of (i) firewood, (ii) fodder, and (iii) timber for domestic use that each forest provides to local users. Using wards-linkage hierarchical clustering, we generated nested classes for 314 forests with Biomass, Biodiversity and Livelihoods as the component dimensions. Each cluster has observations that are similar to each other with respect to Biomass, Biodiversity, and Livelihoods, and dissimilar to forest commons in the other four clusters on the three dimensions. We divided the sample into five distinct groups; Sustainable Forests (119), Carbon Forests (23), Conservation Forests (88), Subsistence Forests (57), and Degraded Forests (27).