| Abstract Detail
Recent Topics Posters Whitney, Cory W. [1], Bahati, Joseph [2], Gebauer, Jens [3]. Value of plants in Ugandan homegardens; results of homegardens inventories and participatory ethnobotany investigations. Introduction: Homegardens are complex and small scale traditional farming systems, predominantly in the humid tropics, characterized as intimate multi-story gardens around homesteads, designed to meet household consumption needs and produce for markets. They are diverse agroforestry systems containing a variety of crops and indigenous plants with an associated diversity of traditional knowledge. Little is known about this diversity in the highland homegardens of the Ugandan Southwest. The study described aimed to bridge this gap. Â Agriculture is the main economic activity in the region, mainly small-scale producers engaged in a wide range of crops and other commodities, notably production of Matooke Musa acuminata Colla (AAA-EA). Homegardens in the region are dominated by bananas and intercropped with coffee, staples, fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, and trees for fuel wood with few small livestock. Methods: The work described is based on interviews and homegarden inventories with 102 farmers in the Greater Bushenyi region in 2014 and 2015. Categorization of plants into different uses by farmers was done using the quantitative ethnobotany indices including, most importantly, the use report (UR), which occurs when a species is mentioned or observed being used for a certain defined use-category and the cultural importance index, or UR divided by N. Agro-ecological importance is here measured with the Summed Dominance Ration (SDR). Results: The 31 plants with a Ci index score above 0.5 included 8 annuals and 13 perennials, 1 liane climber, 3 shrubs, and 6 trees. >60% were used for food, >15% for sale, >2% for hygiene, >1% for technical uses, other use categories were less than 1% of UR. Correlation tests of ecological and ethnobotany scores indicated that those plants with the highest Ci index scores were among those with the greatest SDR (p<0.05) and importance to the diversity of the homegardens. Acknowledgements:Â This project (031A247B) is financially supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the collaborative research project GlobE-RELOAD.
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Related Links:
Slow Food: Saving Biodiversity in the Greater Bushenyi Region
GlobE RELOAD: Reducing Losses Adding Value
1 - University of Kassel, Faculty of Organic Agriculture, Witzenhausen, Germany
2 - Makerere University, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Kampala, Uganda
3 - Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, Kleve, Germany
Keywords:
ethnobotany
Homegarden
biodiversity
Agroecology
Uganda.
Presentation Type: Recent Topics Poster
Session: P
Location: Hall D/The Shaw Conference Centre
Date: Monday, July 27th, 2015
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PRT010
Abstract ID:1792
Candidate for Awards:None |
