Abstract:
Traditional homegardens in southwest Ethiopia is well-known land use practices playing an
important role in both biodiversity conservation and livelihood aspects. Thus, the objective of this
study was to examine the contribution of homegardens towards of biodiversity conservation and
local people livelihoods.Homegarden plant diversity assessment and household interview data
collection methods were used.Systematic random and simple random sampling methods were used
to select 139 households and 45 homegardens respectively. Descriptive statistics, diversity indices,
one way ANOVA and Pearson correlation were used for analysis. A total of 79 plant species
belonging to 41 families were identified. Family Fabaceae and Rutaceae have a relatively higher
number of species (6 species each). In terms of habit, (34%) of the species were herbs followed by
trees (30%), shrubs (27%) and climbers (9%). Farmers manage both exotic (61%) and indigenous
(39%), from which 57% were food and 43% nonfood plant species. The Shannon, Simpson and
evenness diversity indexes were 3.27, 0.053 and 0.87 respectively. Coffea arabica was the most
frequent (86.67%) species followed by Persea americana (68.89) and Catha edulis (64.44) in
homegardens of the area. Homegarden agroforestry was more important for a food source, and
contribute about 4079.70Birr annual income on average. Total land and homegarden land sizes
shown a positive correlation with species richness (r = 0.199*, r=0.170*) at p<0.05 level of
significance. This study suggests that homegardens contribute to plant biodiversity conservation
and the sustenance of the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the study area. However, due to
few market-oriented crops concentration, biodiversity of the system have been affected. Thus,
gardeners should be encouraged to cultivate versatile plants in the practice for effective
biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvements.
