Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Tree rich Homegardens are one of the major land uses in the country as a Trees Outside Forests (TOF) source, possess high resilience capacity to reduce the impacts of climate change since they provide a number of ecosystems services. Objectives of this research are to estimate the dynamics of Homegardens with respect to forest cover in terms of extent and to estimate tree diversity of Homegardens. Natural forest cover of the Upper Mahaweli Catchment located in the central highlands, has been reduced remarkably over the last two centuries and confined to a few isolated patches with little avenues for further expansion. Due to large scale deforestation the catchment has been subjected to number of environmental problems such as soil erosion, landslides, floods and prolong droughts which are further aggravated due climate change impacts. Spatial and temporal dynamics of Homegarden land use with respect to forest cover and other land uses in the UMC over the past three decades were estimated using geospatial technologies and tree diversity was estimated using diversity indices through a resource assessment survey with a sample of 500 Homegardens. Results reveal that, the extent of Homegardens has been increased by 10% over the study period while the limited forest cover in the catchment is remained same. Tree diversity of Homegrdens more or less similar to some tropical forests. Hence, Homegardens possess a high potential of enhancing resilience capacity, they can be taken as one of the best TOF sources to compensate lack of forest cover in UMC.