Community Participation in Forest Resource Management in Nepal

Livelihood of the people in Nepal hills depends much upon forest resources in addition to farming as forest plays a critical role in the well being of the farming households where access to alternative sources, such as energy for cooking, nutrition for animals, materials for fertilizer and constructing materials for shelter, are limited. Thus, the well being of the people in the hills is directly affected by the management of these forest resources. This issue was addressed in this paper by examining the forest resource management practices and its effect on well being of rural people in two different stages in a village lying in the steep hill of Mahabharat Range in the southern hills of Kathmandu valley, Lalitpur District. The main ethnic/caste groups in the village are Brahmin/Chhetri (high Hindu caste), Magar/Tamang (Tibeto Burmans) and Kami (occupational caste: cobbler). Currently there are four community forest users groups, with mixed ethnic membership, organized to manage the forest resources. The endowments, weak institutional settings, before 1990 helped the Bhramins, Magars and Tamangs to get access into the private forest endowment, which made them easy to get access to the forest resources, mainly fuel wood, fodder and timber in 1990 and enhanced their well beings. But the socially backward Kami could not get benefit from the institutions that existed during that time and had less chance to enhance their well beings. After the set up of different endowments during late 1990s, i.e., hand over of forest management to usersgroupsin line with the concept of community forest, environment to use the forest resources became better for all the groups, along with the management of the forest. This enhanced the well beings of all the groups in the study village. However, the ability of Kami to use the forest resources to enhance their well beings was still lacking behind. The reason was partially due to the difference in endowments carried over from the endowments before 1990, and partly due to their occupational work and location of their settlements.

Rural coping and adaptation strategies for climate change by Himalayan communities in Nepal

Climate change has major impacts on the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities.The unpredictable weather conditions in rural Nepal have been attributed to a changing climate.This study explored the climate change adaptation and coping strategies that rural communities adopt for the conservation of natural resources and livelihoods in the mid-hills of Nepal.This paper explored major climatic hazards,assessed different coping and adaptation measures,and barrier faced to climate change adaptation based on perceptions by forest-dependent communities.We conducted focus group discussions,questionnaire surveys,and semistructured interviews with local communities and stakeholders.The results showed that rural communities had experienced significant impacts of climate change and variability.In response,they are practicing diverse coping and adaptation strategies,including the construction of bioengineering structures and planting different species that grow quickly and establish promptly.

Community-Aware Resource Profiling for Personalized Search in Folksonomy

In recent years, there is a fast proliferation of collaborative tagging （a.k.a. folksonomy） systems in Web 2.0 communities. With the increasingly large amount of data, how to assist users in searching their interested resources by utilizing these semantic tags becomes a crucial problem. Collaborative tagging systems provide an environment for users to annotate resources, and most users give annotations according to their perspectives or feelings. However, users may have different perspectives or feelings on resources, e.g., some of them may share similar perspectives yet have a conflict with others. Thus, modeling the profile of a resource based on tags given by all users who have annotated the resource is neither suitable nor reasonable. We propose, to tackle this problem in this paper, a community-aware approach to constructing resource profiles via social filtering. In order to discover user communities, three different strategies are devised and discussed. Moreover, we present a personalized search approach by combining a switching fusion method and a revised needs-relevance function, to optimize personalized resources ranking based on user preferences and user issued query. We conduct experiments on a collected real life dataset by comparing the performance of our proposed approach and baseline methods. The experimental results verify our observations and effectiveness of proposed method.