No abstract

Rapid population growth, unsustainable land use, and a pervasively degrading landscape are components of a dominant paradigm regarding African development. While recent work articulating the 'misreading' of the African landscape have begun to challenge this paradigm, much work remains regarding the pervasiveness and character of this misread. A method is presented for investigating mechanisms of land-cover change that combines remotely sensed data, archival data, and rapid appraisals in a way less influenced by dominant paradigms. We present a case where increasing human activity is resulting in accumulation of woody biomass on edaphic grasslands of a forest-grassland mosaic, rather than the expansion of grasslands at the expense of forests as is currently understood in that area. These increases in biomass are stimulated by anthropogenic influences that are shaped by institutional and edaphic factors. We do not claim that resources are being pervasively enhanced across sub-Saharan Africa under conditions of population growth, but that there may be many mechanisms of change, resulting in both degradation and enhancement, occurring simultaneously across sub-Saharan Africa or even intra-regionally within a nation under these conditions. The integration and application of these methods serve to improve applied analyses of land-cover change to better characterize these mechanisms, and avoid the wrong policy prescriptions.

Despite heavy pressure and disturbance, state property regimes have stemmed deforestation within protected areas of the West Mengo region of Uganda for over 50 yr. In this manuscript, we reconstruct the process of creation and maintenance of forest reserve boundaries in the West Mengo region of Uganda to identify why these boundaries have largely remained stable over the long term under conditions in which they may be predicted to fail. The dramatic boundary stability in West Mengo we attribute to key aspects of institutional design and enforcement of boundaries.

Early detection of forest degradation may help to compensate for the time-lag that often exists between recognition of poor stewardship and the policy-changes required to mitigate such negative impacts. We report here on an International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) pilot study in Uganda.

Rice growing is an important source of food and income to the farming community in the northern agro-ecological zone (NAEZ) of Uganda. NAEZ comprised of 16 districts which form Acholi and Lango sub-regions and it is categorized by tropical dry climate with bimodal rainfall patterns. However, inspite of the importance of rice in the NAEZ, very little information exists that could support prioritization of development in the sector. This paper therefore, bridges information gap by analyzing characteristics of rice production system in the study area based on data obtained from a field survey conducted during 2016. The study used cross-sectional design to collect data which was analysed using the descriptive statistics of the STATA computer package. The results revealed marked difference in households' characteristics, production output and input utilization, production practices and constraints between lowland and upland systems. The study has concluded that: climate variability, pest and diseases, lack of improved seed variety, labour related constraints and lack of specialization are potential causes of low rice production and productivity in the NAEZ. However, to improve production performance of the systems, the study recommends promotion of climate smart farming in rice and further research into system based effects of climate on productivity as well as farmers' adaptation to climate variability.