Contribution of Area Closure for Biodiversity conservation and its socio-economic Importance to Local community Dugda woreda, East Shewa, Oromia, Ethiopia.
Authors: Ereso Tsegu 
Published: November 2024

Background: In sub-saharan africa, land degradation is a prevalent issue, and managing many semi-arid regions can be difficult due to its restoration. about 70% of ethiopia's landmass is driest, making it one of the world's largest developing nations. of this, 46% is the nation's total arable land . natural vegetation and animals in the rift valley are fast disappearing due to extreme human pressure natural vegetation and animals in the rift valley are fast disappearing due to extreme human pressure. For reduce these problem in most part of ethiopia area closure is implanted and dugda woreda area closure one of them.
Objective: The goal of the study was to assess contribution of area closure in the recovery of woody species and its socio-economic importance to local community dugda woreda, east shewa, oromia, Ethiopia.
Methods: for vegetation data a standard systematic transect sampling method was employed. parallel transect lines were laid crossing each study site from edge to edge. the transect lines were laid at a distance of 50 m from the edges to avoid the effects of disturbances. transects were laid at 200 m apart. vegetation sampling was done in a sampling quadrat of 20 m * 20 m in the year 2019. all sampling quadrats were distributed along the transects at a distance of 100 m interval between quadrats. the first sampling quadrat on each transect was laid randomly. a total of 65 sampling quadrats (43 from area closure and 22 from free gazing land) were used for vegetation sampling. the number of quadrat plots was proportionally distributed based on the area coverage of each of the protected and open grazing lands. for socio-economic a total of 137 families were selected for the socioeconomic survey. Among them, there are 21 wealthy households, 52 middle-class households, and 63 impoverished households. Version 22 of the statistical package for social sciences software was utilized for data analysis, semi-structured questionnaires were created, and the proportionate sampling technique was employed to determine the size of the household sample for the survey.
Result and Discussion: a total of 64 woody species representing 30 families were recorded from the entire study sites. a total of 47 species (from 28 families) and 16 species (from 16 families) were recorded in area closure and its adjacent open grazing land, respectively. among the total families recorded, 12 families were common to both area closures and the open grazing lands whereas the remaining 14 families were recorded only in the area closures. fabaceae family was represented by nine species, which is the most dominant family followed by flacourtia ceae, myrtaceae and rosaceaefamilies each represented by three species. the woody species' evenness and diversity in terms of area closure are 2.21 and 0.86, respectively and the woody species' evenness and diversity in terms of free open grazing are 1.99 and 0.69, respectively the trend generally suggests that the longer the period of area closures, the higher the likely increase in species richness, diversity and evenness. compared to the open grazing lands, the indices for area closure were found to be twice as high as those of the open grazing lands. According to the responses, the primary sources of income for the majority of household heads were crop farming (32.4 percent) and livestock husbandry (40.14 percent). Approximately 81.88 percent of the respondents believe that local municipalities manage area closures well. 88.32% of the respondents expressed favorable opinions about area closing processes.