Importance Of Forest Resources In Kenya

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1. CHAPTER ONE
1.1. INTRODUCTION
Forest resources contribute significantly to Kenya’s economy. The agriculture sector, manufacturing and processing industry and the tourism sector which are backbone of the country’s economy directly or indirectly rely on our dwindling forest resources. Kenyan’s major river systems (Tana, Athi, and Ewaso Nyiro) source their water from mountain forest catchment.
These rivers traverse country providing fresh water for domestic use, industrial processing, irrigation and hydro-electric generation. Like river Tana alone supplies water for the seven fork hydro-electric power stations, providing more than half of the country’s electricity. In addition forest provides building and weaving materials pulp for the paper industry, herbal medicine, wild fruits and honey, regulates rainfall patterns, reduces sedimentation load in our rivers and provide environmental stability.
By 2003 Kenya forest had reduced to 1.4 million hectares which is less than 2% of the country’s land area 56.9 million hectares 15% of Kenya’s land area (Kenya Forest Working Group), this according to the united nations FAO group , Kenya is thus environmentally unstable. “Any country with less than 10% of its land covered by forest is environmentally unstable.” (United Nations FAO). At present, the world’s forests cover about 4 billion hectares which accounts for 31% of the world’s land area. The distribution of the world’s forest is shown in figure 1.1. It illustrates the distribution of forest on a global scale. Other wooded land covers about 1.1 billion hectares (FAO 2010). Then areas of world’s forest can be seen in table 1.1.

Fig 1.1 Distribution of the world’s forest (Source FAO 2006)
Table 1.1 Global distributions by region (...

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...stigation(Lillesand et al., 2008).
Sensors abroad satellites in space, record the amount of electromagnetic energy reflected from various objects on the earth’s surface at various wavelengths. From the spectral response patterns, information about the objects is derived. Through the analysis of remotely sensed data for different epochs change detection is possible. With time change analysis, monitoring of forest destruction can be done. The knowledge acquired from this information forms a basis for decision making in efforts to address the deforestation. It is with this mind that this project was carried out to establish factual information on the state of Nyambene Hills forest, in Meru North district in Meru County whose reported danger of extinction has attracted from the public and many environmental organizations considering the value of these forests resources.

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