PLANT DIVERSITY AND QUANTIFICATION OF ABOVE GROUND CARBON STORAGE OF HOME GARDENS IN SELECTED UPAZILAS OF MANIKGANJ DISTRICT

Abstract

Home garden is considered to hold a large amount for carbon, particularly for climate change mitigation and adaptation under changing environment. This is owing to their multifunctional ecosystem services while declining pressure on natural forests and hence saving and storing carbon. This study was focused on estimating aboveground carbon stock, patterns of tree species diversity and farmer’s livelihood. The study was conducted in Saturia and Manikganj Sadar upazilas of Manikganj district. Four villages namely Malshi, Horgage, Mokimpur and Diyara vobanipur were selected randomly from the selected upazilas. A total of 120 households were selected randomly from these villages as sample of the study and data were collected on the basis of tree diversity, carbon stock and farmer’s livelihood. The farm size of the respondent’s home garden owners ranged from 0.14 ha to 2.85 ha and most of them (57.50%) were small farm holder. In large home garden, the contribution of home garden income to the owners’ daily income was about 30%. In medium home garden, it was around 17%, while in small home garden the contribution was only around 8%. A total of 1990 trees were sampled and 21 different tree species under 16 families were identified and recorded under this study. It was found that large home garden had 21 different types of species where mean number of tree per hectare was 21, medium home garden had 17 different types of species where mean number of trees per hectare was 29 and small home garden had 13 different types of tree species where mean number of tree was 37 tree ha . There were seven major species found in the home gardens namely, Mango which is 28.74% of total number of species followed by Guava (14.62%), Jujube (11.11%), Mahagoni (10.65%), Jackfruit (7.59%), Coconut (6.08%) and Eucalyptus (4.92%). The Shannon Wiener index was used to evaluate the tree diversity per home garden and it ranged from 0.32 to 2.17 with a mean value of 1.42. Among 120 home gardens average tree carbon stock (above ground carbon stock) was found 39.29 Mg ha -1 which ranged from 22.74 Mg C ha to 165.51 Mg ha -1 . Among the seven major dominating species, the highest amount of carbon was stored by Mango (41.25 Mg) followed by Jujube (31.45 Mg), Mahogani (27.21 Mg), Guava (15.14 Mg), Jackfruit (11.78 Mg), Coconut (6.39 Mg) and Eucalyptus (4.50 Mg). These results imply that home garden can serve as an important ecological tool in terms of carbon sequestration, conservation of tree species diversity.