Approaches to Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity Conservation: With Pivotal Role of Non Timber Forest Products

Management of forests sustainably is a global challenge. With the gradual rise in population, forest cover and natural resources have been depleting. Over exploitation of timber alarmed the forest managers and policy makers and compelled them to ban or restrict timber harvesting. To make up the revenue loss from timber, Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) have been globally considered as an alternative source of earnings from the forests. But due to over exploitation of NTFP, forest resources have been further dwindling and adversely affecting the biodiversity and ecology. With the above considerations FAO recommended that NTFP should be integrated into the main stream of forest management planning and execution. But implementation of NTFP-oriented need based sustainable forest management has become an onerous task for the foresters and policy makers due to want of information for consolidated approaches. This book entitled "Approaches to Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity Conservation with Pivotal Role of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP)" is an endeavour in the above direction to develop strategies and evolve mechanism for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) which may solve global forestry problems. An attempt has been made to address related issues and aspects in the book as mere guidelines for adoption of an integrated, holistic and multi-disciplinary approach for SFM. This is a very broad subject, however, the matter has been organized and written in eight chapters, briefly furnishing global scenario of NTFP, their marketing and trade, SFM and biodiversity conservation approaches, research needs, futuristic policy and recommendations which may offer an insight for sound SFM with pivotal role of NTFP. The book is likely to be useful to the forest managers, policy makers, researchers, entrepreneurs and other user groups in India and abroad for SFM in a broad manner, while the forest managers may work out finer details for implementation according to site conditions prevailing in different countries.