Forest recovery was better in the districts where forests were maintained by local communities

NEPAL — The study, ‘Socio-economic Factors and Management Regimes as Drivers of Tree Cover Change in Nepal’, mentions that while the country lost forest cover of 46,000 hectares, it gained 12,200 hectares of forest in that period, indicating that the total forest cover loss was 33,800 hectares. The country has total tree covered area of 4.74 million hectares in 2000 before the research began. The study was recently published in the biodiversity and conservation section of the PeerJ, an international online journal. The study, jointly co-authored by three scholars including two Nepalis – Sujata Shrestha and Uttam B Shrestha – for an American and an Australian university.