Prospects of Kirala Kele Marsh Land to Conserve as a Community Forest in Matara District of Sri Lanka

Utilisation and conservation, both should be carried out simultaneously with equalimportance for a sustainable forest management. Community forestry is an emerging conceptcomes within this context indicating village level forestry activities decided collectively andlocals participate in planning, establishing, managing and harvesting with socio-economicand ecological benefits in return. Kirala Kele is one example from Matara District. In order toassess Kirala Kele as a community forest, the study focused on three aspects; direct benefitsextracted, participatory decision making in forest management, and potentials todevelopment. A questionnaire survey was carried out over 45 forest dwellers from threeGrama Niladhari divisions; Godagama, Hiththatiya, and Nadugala according to purposivesampling. Informal and formal discussions were held with officers and community leaders.Secondary data were gathered from relevant literature sources. The results reveal that thelevel of forest utilisation varied over the resources confined to a range of high, moderate, andlow. Most of them associate with agriculture. Majority (78%) utilise for koratu farming.Seventy-one percent are extracting wood, timber, and firewood. Utilisation for medicine,grazing field, food and fruits, flowers are around 40 percent each. But, the frequency ofutilisation is low since they extract these only for their usage except koratu farming andflowers. The accessibility is 61 percent in average. Forty two percent of community involvesin decision making regarding the forest management. It depicts a positive associationbetween education and decision making (χ2=6.4315). Hiththatiya and Nadugala hadfunctioning community based organizations (CBOs) Diriya and Fisheries associationrespectively, which had certain contribution on Kirala Kele forest management withmembership strength of 89 percent. Co-management could be identified due to theparticipation of government (35%), community (32%), NGOs – Bio diversity society andConservation society (11%), private sector (4%) and other households (18%). Thesatisfaction of living near to Kirala Kele is significant (Zcal = 3.97). Further, Kirala Kele hasa high potential to develop as an eco tourism destination (0.64), eco village (0.2), and birdwatching zone (0.16). In fact, the study can conclude that the Kirala Kele has a high potentialto widen its benefits toward the forest dwellers within the limits of sustainable resourceutilisation assuring active participation and contribution of the responsible personals. Despitethere are certain drawbacks, its performances are more or less supportive to consider KiralaKele as a community forest with a great scope for further developments.