Developing Inventory Techniques For Africa

Project Title	Development of inventory techniques for non-wood forest products in Africa
FAO project number	GCP/RAF/354/EC
Title of Project	Sustainable forest management programme in African ACP countries
Contract Contribution	Development of techniques to assess non-wood forest products
Geographic Focus	African ACP countries (Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Benin, Cameroon & Central African Republic)
Principal Funder	EU

This contract ran for three years and was concerned with the development of guidelines for NWFP inventory in African ACP countries. As part of this work two meetings of African inventory experts were held in Lusaka, Zambia and Yaounde, Cameroon. Each meeting commissioned three case studies to address priority problems in NWFP inventory. The case studies were intended to provide experience and tested protocols for use in guidelines to be developed by the project. The six case studies were:

Country	Species	Topic	Problem
Benin	Kinkeliba	Leaf yield per shrub	Shrubs which form a continuous canopy are difficult to count – how could leaf biomass on a shrub canopy be measured?
Cameroon	Johimbe	Bark mass per tree	Normally, only the bark on tree boles is measured, but it would be useful to be able to estimate branch bark volumes – how might this be done?
Central African Republic	Poto (eru)	Plant density per ha	These lianas are difficult to locate and are loosly clumped in the forest – how can they be sampled efficiently?
Kenya	Baobab	Fruit numbers per tree	Counting fruit on large trees is time consuming and difficult – is it possible to efficiently sample within a tree crown?
Malawi	Edible mushrooms	Seasonal cap yield per ha	Objectively chosen sites do not seem to reflect the abundance or variety of mushrooms in the market – could the use of local knowledge improve on the representiveness of field monitoring data?
Zambia	Tree fruit and bulbous herbs	Plant density per ha	What are the costs and benefits of optimising sampling for specific species over using a standardised design for all species?

Reports

FOPW/03/4 Expert meeting for development on inventory techniques to assess non-wood forest product resources in African ACP countries, Lusaka, Zambia. 15-17 October 2001.

www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y5360E/y5360e09.htm#2

FOPW/03/5 Réunion des experts des pays francophones d’Afrique sur le développement des techniques pour l’évaluation des produits forestiers non ligneux. Yaoundé, Cameroun. 15-17 Février 2002.

www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y5360E/y5360e09.htm#2

FOPW/03/6 Summary of six case study reports as a contribution to development of practical techniques to assess non-wood forest product resources.

www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y5360E/y5360e09.htm#2

Free of charge from: Forest Products and Economics Division, Forestry Department,
FAO, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy. Fax: +39 0657055137;
Email: non-wood-news@fao.org

The guidelines document which incorporates lessons from the case studies along with advice on the design of NWFP inventory is presently in the form of a first draft and is incomplete.

Reports are prepared in Adobe Acrobat Software. If you can not view these files, please download your free copy of this software from the Adobe web site.

Please contact Wild Resources Limited if you would like further information about this project.