Participatory active restoration of communal forests in temperate Himalaya, India

Potential of community participation and non-timber forest species in forest restoration has been widely discussed but rarely demonstrated through long-term empirical studies. An attempt was made to restore the communal forest in temperate Indian Himalaya by mixed planting of multipurpose broad-leaved trees, bamboo, and medicinal herbs chosen by local people based on pooled indigenous and scientific knowledge. Funding was terminated after 7 years, while people-researcher interactions and monitoring of the restored forest and competing land uses/economic activities continued. People viewed co-occurrence of gregarious flowering induced mortality of bamboo and excessive crop/beehive damage by wildlife in the 10th year as a setback. Further, they envisioned threats to intact forest from mounting timber demand. As a common mitigation measure, they planted in gaps fast-growing and nitrogen-fixing Alnus nepalensis excluded in the initial treatment for harboring pests, yielding inferior products, and its negative association with medicinal herbs/bamboo. After 20 years, transplanted trees/bamboos were over two times taller than the naturally regenerated ones. The plantation had 75% of belowground and 17% of aboveground carbon stocks and 39% of flowering plant species in intact forest and was economically more efficient than intact forest and farms. People did not expand the trial because of its ineffectiveness in mitigating new problems and satisfying new aspirations. Agricultural abandonment nullified restoration-mediated carbon sequestration. There is a need of translating ecological concepts underlying cost-effective restoration into practices and of policies supporting participatory long-term adaptive forest restoration and its synergy with other economic activities in cultural landscapes.