planning for both developmental intervention and on-farm conservation strategies at the
community level.
CONCLUSION
SWI provides useful measures of richness for home garden species. The index is used to
characterise the species diversity of home gardens. However, it lacks the information on
whether the reported species in the communities are distributed evenly, and it cannot explain
the evenness and dominance of the species. But while we measure the species richness, it
is equally important to understand the evenness and the degree of dominance of species in
the community. Therefore, while measuring species richness in home gardens, it is
suggested to use other indices, such as evenness index to know how equally abundant the
species are in the home garden and Simpson’s index to understand the degree whether a
community is dominated by one or a few very common species. These three indices
together give a picture on the species diversity in home gardens. The information collected
on species diversity in home gardens suggested that home gardens could be used as a
management and conservation unit for agrobiodiversity. Furthermore, home gardens in
study sites are better understood for diversifying the nutrition of rural people through
promoting home gardens in order to achieve household food security and on-farm crop
conservation of agrobiodiversity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was made possible with the financial support from the Swedish Biodiversity Centre
(CBM), Uppsala, Sweden. I gratefully acknowledge Associate Prof Dr Carl-Gustaf
Thornstrom and Dr Anil Subedi for supervising me on this research work. My sincere
acknowledgement also goes to the farmers of Gulmi and Rupandehi as this work would not
have been possible without their support. Thanks are due to LI-BIRD and its staff for
providing me an opportunity to carry out the study in its home garden project sites and for
their technical, secretarial and logistical supports. I would like to appreciate the contributions
and valuable suggestions from Bhuwon Sthapit, Ram Rana, Pablo Eyzaguirre and Marie
Bystrom. Similarly, the statistical backstopping and taxonomic verification from Åke Berg,
Sanjaya Gyawali and Dharma Dangol are highly acknowledged.
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