Abstract
It is vital to explore the ecological resilience capacity of Kandyan Homegardens in Sri Lanka, as the major source of Trees Outside Forests (TOF), to reduce the impacts of climate change in environmentally Upper Mahaweli Catchment (UMC) in Sri Lanka since they provide almost all ecosystem services as a forest does. We estimated the dynamics of Homegardens with respect to forest cover, in terms of extent from 1992 -2022 in the Kandy district which covers the majority area of UMC, using geospatial technologies. Then tree density and diversity of Homegardens were estimated using diversity indices. A detail resource assessment survey was carried out with a sample of 250 Homegardens in Kandy district. We revealed that the natural forest cover of the Kandy district remained same as 17% over the study period and it confined to a few isolated patches with little avenues for further expansion. In contrarily, the extent of Homegardens has been increased nearly up to 63%. Tree density varies from 300.26 to 1113.83 with the average of 694.80 trees/ha. Tree diversity derived from Shannon index varied from 1.23 - 2.38 with the mean of 1.49 and it varied from 0.59 to 0.94 with the mean of 0.71 based on the Sympson index. These values are nearly similar to tropical forests in South Asia. Hence, Homegardens possess a high potential to enhance resilience capacity to reduce the impacts due to climate change in ecological and, socio-economic terms due to their growing extent and their high tree density and diversity.
Presenters
Badra HearathSenior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Sri Jayewardhenepura, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems
KEYWORDS
TREES OUTSIDE FORESTS, ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE, UPPER MAHAWELI CATCHMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS, GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY, TREE DENSITY AND DIVERSITY
