Protected area planning in the tropics: Uganda's national system of forestnature reserves

Uganda is one of the most biologically diverse countries in Africa, with mu ch of its biodiversity represented in a system of 10 national parks, 10 wil dlife reserves, and 710 forest reserves, covering 33,000 km(2) (14%) of the country's area. We focus on the role of the forest reserves in biodiversit y conservation and describe a procedure we developed to design a national s ystem of forest nature reserves. In the late 1980s a policy was instituted to dedicate half the area of forest reserves to sustainable timer productio n and the other half to environmental protection (with 20% as nature reserv es). to select suitable sites, a 5-year, US$1-million program of biodiversi ty and resource assessment was undertaken, focusing on five biological indi cator species groups and covering all the major forest reserves. Based on d ata generated by the field studies, we ranked each forest in terms of vario us criteria-(species richness, rarity, value for nonconsumptive uses, timbe r production, and importance to local communities)-and used an iterative si te selection procedure to choose the most suitable combination of forests f or nature reserve establishment. Our procedure maximized complementarity in representing species and habitats in reserves across the whole protected-a rea system. We initially selected sites using purely biological criteria bu t later modified our procedure to ensure that opportunity costs and potenti al land-use conflicts were minimized. Our preferred network of sites includ ed 14 forests that, in combination with the existing national parks, would account for 96% of species represented in the country's protected areas. Th ese 14 forests were classified as "prime" and "core" sites and were selecte d for the establishment of large nature reserves (averaging 100 km(2)). The addition of 25 smaller "secondary" forest nature reserves (averaging 32 km (2)) would protect more than 99% pf the indicator species.