This is an announcement to invite you to the CSEAS Colloquium for January 2015.

Date & Time: 22 January (Thursday) 2015, 16:00~

Place: Middle-sized Meeting Room (No. 332), 3rd Floor, Inamori Foundation Building, Kyoto University

Speaker: Dr. Md. Enamul Kabir (Professor at Forestry and Wood Technology Discipline, Life Science School of Khulna University, Bangladesh, and Visiting Research Scholar at CSEAS)

Title: Traditional agroforestry homegardening: perspective for biodiversity conservation through use in Bangladesh

Abstract:
In managed landscapes, tree-dominated habitats such as homegarden often show promise for biodiversity conservation. In Bangladesh where natural forest cover is less than 10%, homegardens, which are maintained by at least 20 million households, represent possible strategies for biodiversity conservation and livelihood outcomes. Seventy-five percent of the homegarden plant species are cultivated and 59% native to the Indian subcontinent. Some recorded species are on the Bangladesh IUCN Red List. A typical Bangladesh homegarden of 1000 m2 may contained a mean of 34 species (range 2–107) and 107 individuals of trees and shrubs (1003 ha-1) in five vertical strata. All recorded species from homegardens are useful, of which 40% found multipurpose. In general, native plant species are more commonly used for all purposes. There is a significant botanical richness contained in Bangladesh homegardens represent greater relative importance to biodiversity conservation than most other parts of Asia, and possibly the tropical region generally. Thus, whereas richness across the landscape was high, serious effort must be made to increase the populations of rare species and their conservation. Overlaying all conservation activities is the inclusion of local communities in the process, who were the ones to retain these plant species in homegardens in the first place, and the stakeholders who will determine whether homegardens indeed act as long-term repositories to biodiversity conservation through use. Market access generally influences homegardens species composition and structure depending mainly on the homegarden management objective. The general hypothesis of subsistence homegarden is that the stem density and species richness in the homegarden are less influenced by the market economy. The negative influence of easy accessibility to the market and positive influence of the distance to the market on the species richness in Bangladesh homegarden supports the general hypothesis of subsistence homegardens. Therefore, long-term influence of the market on the homegarden’s attributes needs to be investigated in future studies to test whether the general hypothesis of species loss from the homegardens due to commercialization could take place in Bangladesh context.

Biography:
Md. Enamul Kabir has been a faculty member for more than 18 years in Bangladesh’s public university (currently a Professor). He conducted his postgraduate studies (MSc and PhD) at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand. His PhD fieldwork entailed complete botanical surveys of more than 400 homegardens in SW Bangladesh, making it one of the most extensive—if not the most—homegarden surveys in existence. He has established an international reputation in agroforestry sciences, with particular expertise in homegardens. He has published a number of solid papers in international peer reviewed journals and also served as a reviewer for several international peer reviewed journals. He has significant experience with fieldwork and novel, crosscutting analytical research protocols and has participated in forest dynamic studies in the South Pacific islands of American Samoa, Thailand, and Bangladesh. He has has been trained in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research protocol (www.umich.edu/~ifri), which is a global, interdisciplinary research programme combining several integrated research tools that are founded on extensive institutional theory on Common Pool Resources (CPR) management.

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