PLANNING CONSERVATION AREAS IN UGANDA NATURAL FORESTS

In the late 1980s the Ugandan Government decided to dedicate a fifth ( 3000 sq km) of the country's 15,000-sq-km forest estate to management as Strict Nature Reserves (SNRs) for the protection of biodiversity. T he Forest Department subsequently undertook a 5-year programme of biol ogical inventory and socioeconomic evaluation to select appropriate ar eas for designation. Sixty-five of the country's principal forests (in cluding five now designated as National Parks) were systematically eva luated for biodiversity, focusing on five 'indicator' taxa (woody plan ts, birds, small mammals, butterflies and large moths). A scoring syst em wits developed to compare and rank sites according to their suitabi lity for nature reserve establishment and 11 key sites were identified , which, when combined with the country's 10 national parks, account f or more than 95 per cent of Uganda's species. In order to satisfy mult iple-use management objectives, the Man and the Biosphere model of res erve design is being applied at each forest, by designating a centrall y located core area as SNR, with increasingly intensive resource use p ermitted towards the periphery of each reserve and adjacent rural comm unities.