The sustainability of trade in wild plants-A data-integration approach tested on critically endangered .

While the demand for many products from wild-harvested plants is growing rapidly, the sustainability of the associated plant trade remains poorly understood and understudied. We integrate ecological and trade data to advance sustainability assessments, using the critically endangered in Nepal to exemplify the approach and illustrate the conservation policy gains. Through spatial distribution modeling and structured interviews with traders, wholesalers, and processors, we upscale district-level trade data to provincial and national levels and compare traded amounts to three sustainable harvest scenarios derived from stock and yield data in published inventories and population ecology studies.

A unique environmental augmented household-level livelihood panel dataset from Nepal.

This paper presents primary household-level panel data for the investigation of rural livelihoods dynamics in Nepal. The data is environmental augmented through the inclusion of information on environmental resource use allowing estimation of household-level environmental income. The main variables included are: household demographics (individual's age, gender, educational status, marital status), assets (livestock, implements, land, jewellery, saving, debt), income (from the environment, crop production, livestock rearing, business ownership, wage employment, remittances, and other sources), and household shock experiences (e.

Patterns of change: The dynamics of medicinal plant trade in far-western Nepal.

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Combined quantitative and qualitative environmental product trade studies, undertaken in the same location over time, are instrumental in identifying plant species with commercial demand and explaining what drives temporal changes. Yet such dynamic studies are rare, including for Himalayan medicinal plants that have been large-scale traded for millennia.

Aim Of The Study: To (i) investigate changes in medicinal plant trade in the past 17 years, and (ii) identify the main factors driving changes, using a study of Darchula District in far-western Nepal.

High altitude organic gold: The production network for Ophiocordyceps sinensis from far-western Nepal.

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Ophiocordyceps sinensis (Berk.) G.H.

Indirect approach for estimation of forest degradation in non-intact dry forest: modelling biomass loss with Tweedie distributions.

Background: Implementation of REDD+ requires measurement and monitoring of carbon emissions from forest degradation in developing countries. Dry forests cover about 40 % of the total tropical forest area, are home to large populations, and hence often display high disturbance levels. They are susceptible to gradual but persistent degradation and monitoring needs to be low cost due to the low potential benefit from carbon accumulation per unit area.

Rural income and forest reliance in highland Guatemala.

This paper estimates rural household-level forest reliance in the western highlands of Guatemala using quantitative methods. Data were generated by the way of an in-depth household income survey, repeated quarterly between November 2005 and November 2006, in 11 villages (n = 149 randomly selected households). The main sources of income proved to be small-scale agriculture (53 % of total household income), wages (19 %) and environmental resources (14 %).

People, plants and health: a conceptual framework for assessing changes in medicinal plant consumption.

Background: A large number of people in both developing and developed countries rely on medicinal plant products to maintain their health or treat illnesses. Available evidence suggests that medicinal plant consumption will remain stable or increase in the short to medium term. Knowledge on what factors determine medicinal plant consumption is, however, scattered across many disciplines, impeding, for example, systematic consideration of plant-based traditional medicine in national health care systems.