Abstract:

A total of fourteen forests under government (nature conservation and exploitation), private and communal institutional arrangements used by different local groups living in eight settlements were studied to determine the effect of tree harvesting on the forest conditions. The fieldwork was conducted according to the guidelines of the IFRI research programme. There were significant differences in the occurrence of human consumptive disturbances among forests and institutional arrangements. The distribution of disturbances were also significantly different between two distances (within 30 km and between 30-80 km) from Kampala. However, the regression analysis indicated no significant functional relationship between the distances and the forest variables tested. At both sapling and tree stages, there were significant differences for species richness, the Shannon index, the Simpson index, basal area, and height between forests, as well as institutional arrangements.