Forest lands in Indonesia are classified as state lands and subject to management under agreements allocated by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. There has been a long-standing tension between the ministry and local communities who argue that they have traditionally managed large areas of forest and should be allowed to continue to do so. A series of recent legal and administrative decisions are now paving the way for the allocation of forests to local communities. There is a hypothesis that the communities will protect the forests against industrial conversion and that they will also conserve biodiversity. This hypothesis needs to be closely examined. Conservation of biodiversity and management for local benefits are two different and potentially conflicting objectives. This paper reviews examples of forests managed by local communities in Indonesia and concludes that there is very limited information available on the conservation of natural biodiversity in these forests. I conclude that more information is needed on the status of biodiversity in community managed forests. When forests are allocated for local management, special measures need to be in place to ensure that biodiversity values are monitored and maintained. Full article

Recent decades have seen a rapid movement towards decentralising forest rights and tenure to local communities and indigenous groups in both developing and developed nations. Attribution of local and community rights to forests appears to be gathering increasing momentum in many tropical developing countries. Greater local control of forest resources is a response to the failure of government agencies to exercise adequate stewardship over forests and to ensure that the values of all stakeholders are adequately protected. We reviewed evidence of the impact of decentralised forest management on the biodiversity values of forests and conclude that special measures are needed to protect these values. There are trade-offs between shorter-term local needs for forest lands and products and longer-term global needs for biodiversity and other environmental values. We present evidence of local forest management leading to declining forest integrity with negative impacts on both local forest users and the global environment. We advocate greater attention to measures to ensure protection of biodiversity in locally-managed forests. Full article

Initiatives to manage landscapes for both biodiversity protection and sustainable development commonly employ participatory methods to exploit the knowledge of citizens. We review five examples of citizen groups engaging with landscape scale conservation initiatives to contribute their knowledge, collect data for monitoring programs, study systems to detect patterns, and test hypotheses on aspects of landscape dynamics. Three are from landscape interventions that deliberately target biodiversity conservation and aim to have sustainable development as a collateral outcome. The other two are driven primarily by concerns for agricultural sustainability with biodiversity conservation as a collateral outcome. All five include programs in which, management agencies support data collection by citizen groups to monitor landscape changes. Situations where citizen groups self-organise to collect data and interpret data to aid in landscape scale decision making are less common and are restricted to landscapes where the inhabitants have a high level of scientific literacy. Given the complexity of landscape processes and the multiple decision makers who influence landscape outcomes we argue that citizen science broadly defined should be an essential element of landscape scale initiatives. Conservation managers should create space for citizen engagement in science and should empower citizen groups to experiment, learn, and adapt their decision-making to improve landscape scale outcomes. Full article