Applied Ethnobotany
Applied Ethnobotany: People, Wild Plant Use and Conservation, Anthony B. Cunningham.
2001, Earthscan, London.
This manual focuses on an issue crucial to rural development and conservation: the impact of harvesting of wild plants by people. It thus covers the borderland between cultural and biological diversity. It is intended as a practical guide to approaches and field methods for participatory work between resource-users and field researchers. In particular, it is aimed at African students or professionals working in conservation, rural development or as national park managers who have to make resource management decisions. However, other regions of the world are not neglected and the book is of general relevance.
The emphasis is on how to identify the most urgent problems, needs and opportunities relating to wild plant use and resource management. The manual provides practical guidelines for research which interface applied ecological approaches with the knowledge and expertise of local resource-users.
Chapter headings:
- Conservation and context: different times, different views
- Local inventories, values and quantities of harvested resources
- Settlement, commercialisation and change
- Measuring individual plants and assessing harvesting impacts
- Opportunities and constraints on sustainable harvest: plant populations
- Landscapes and ecosystems: patterns, processes and plant use
- Conservation behaviour, boundaries and beliefs
- Striving for balance: looking outward and inward
- Further reading
- References
