The Role of Homegarden Agroforestry in Biodiversity Conservation and Households Livelihoods in Yayu Coffee Forest Biosphere Reserve, Chora District, Southwestern Ethiopia

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.