National Workshop

On

Creating Common Agenda for Terai Forestry: Lessons Learned from Community and Collaborative Management of Forests

February 20-21, 2006

Kathmandu

Introduction

The management of the Terai forests has been a crucial agenda since their nationalization in 1956. Several vacillating policies immerged in the forestry sector, but the focus on the Terai has gained its impetus since 1990s, when the government started approving Operational Forest Management Plans (OFMP) for the Terai and Inner Terai districts. The OFMPs delineated the district forests into production, protection, and potential community and leasehold forests as the working circles. However, all of the OFMPs are suspended due to several reasons, the most obvious being the lack of sufficient consultations with the principal stakeholders during their preparation. Some of the statistics in the plans with their corresponding facts in the fields were also reported to be mismatched. Consequently, another approach emerged with the Forestry Sector Policy of 2000. It asserted that the contiguous large blocks of Terai forests would be managed under collaborative forest management (CFM) mode, while the barren and isolated forest lands would be handed over as community forests (CF).

A Training Course on Forest Mapping using GPS and GIS technology

Using a compass for forest mapping is a common method so far we have, which is a very traditional one having low work efficiency and making mapping task much more tedious and much more time consuming. To eliminate such demerits and bring efficiency and ease while carrying out a forest survey, a new, more advanced and more sophisticated technique than the traditional one, called Geographic Information Systems (GIS hereafter) has been developed in the recent past. Compared to the traditional Method, GIS technique of forest mapping was proved to be more relevant, efficient and less time consuming.