A VEGETATION-MAINTAINING SYSTEM AS A LIVELIHOOD STRATEGY AMONG THE SEREER, WEST-CENTRAL SENEGAL

A field study of the system of maintaining vegetation practiced by the Sereer people was conducted from October 2001 to July 2002 at N village, located in the Thiès Department of west-central Senegal. For centuries, the Sereer people have practiced millet cultivation in combination with livestock raising and have maintained a unique form of artifi cial vegetation, dominated by the tree Acacia albida. The aim of this study was to reveal how the Sereer use and maintain the vegetation. Acacia albida contributes to their livelihood in several ways by functioning, for example, as a green manure and as fodder for livestock. The Sereer deliberately maintain the vegetation through "yar", which means to grow Acacia albida seedlings in cultivated fi elds. A "yar" behavior is one associated with "upbringing" in the Sereer idiom. Use of this tree up to the 1970s helped to make the Sereer livelihood system more secure in an erratic, semi-arid climate

Changes and Local Adjustment in the Faidherbia Albida Use as Fodder and Fuelwood among the Sereer, Senegal

Despite numerous studies on the potential functions of Faidherbia albida, farmer’s contexts and practices in the tree use are largely unknown. The study described how the Sereer reshaped their techniques of foliage and branch collection for fodder and fuelwood in response to socio-economic changes. Married men turned to fattening livestock to highly increase its cash value, and promoted foliage growth through careful pruning to use as fodder. However, it became prevalent for married women to debark the standing trees for easier fuel collection, which caused the trees to die. Men at first did not make a public outcry, because they appreciated the women’s endeavors in fuelwood collection and small retail to provide foodstuffs. Whereas the villagers could not immediately resolve the disharmony between the logics of market economy and subsistence, they eventually coped with the debarking problem by applying the national Forest Code, which lead to a new method of outer bark collection, which was easy but also kept trees alive. Paying attention to people’s attempt against resource scarcity and emerging problems among the different social actors is important to understand the dynamics and sustainability of farmed parklands

It's Not the Availability, But the Accessibility that Matters: Ecological and Economic Potential of Non-Timber Forest Products in Southeast Cameroon

This study examined the ecological availability and economic potential of 10 non-timber forest product (NTFP) species. Irvingia gabonensis and Ricinodendron heudelotii produce large quantities of fruits and have higher economic values compared to other species. The number of nuts and kernels harvested and sold was a small percentage of the total annual production in the area. This is likely to be due to the low human population density and the difficulty in increasing the efficiency of gathering the nuts and kernels. Given the affluent ecological availability demonstrated in this study, even when innovations to improve the efficiency of harvesting are achieved, the trees produce more than 10 times the amount of fruits that can be gathered by all the people in the region, even with their maximum labor input. However, because of the forest zoning carried out by the government in the 1990s, the area that local people can harvest, without any concerns, is limited. What is of concern when promoting the use of NTFPs in southeast Cameroon is not the ecological availability of resources but limited accessibility to the resources, due to conflicts between local people and stakeholders, recently introduced under the national and international forest policies

Signature of hidden order and evidence for periodicity modification in URu₂Si₂

The detail of electronic structures near the Fermi level in URu2Si2 has been investigated employing state-of-art laser angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. The observation of a narrow dispersive band near the Fermi level in the ordered state as well as its absence in a Rh-substituted sample strongly suggest that the emergence of the narrow band is a clear signature of the hidden-order transition. The temperature dependence of the narrow band, which appears at the onset of the hidden-order transition, invokes the occurrence of periodicity modification in the ordered state, which is shown for the first time by any spectroscopic probe. We compare our data to other previous studies and discuss possible implications

Electronic Structure of the Novel Filled Skutterudite PrPt₄Ge₁₂ Superconductor

We have performed soft x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (SXPES) and resonant photoemission spectroscopy (RPES) of the filled skutterudite superconductor PrPt4Ge12 in order to study the electronic structure of valence band and the character of Pr 4f. SXPES of PrPt4Ge12 measured with 1200 eV photon energy, where spectral contribution of Pr 4f is negligible, was found nearly identical with that of LaPt4Ge12, indicating similarity of Pt–Ge derived electronic states of the two compounds. Good correspondence with band calculations allows us to ascribe the dominant Ge 4p character of the density of states at the Fermi level (EF). Pr 3d → 4f RPES shows that, although Pr 4f electrons in PrPt4Ge12 are not as strongly hybridized with conduction electrons near EF as in PrFe4P12, there are finite Pr 4f contribution to the states near EF in PrPt4Ge12. These PES results give the information of fundamental electronic structure for understanding the physical properties of the novel filled skutterudite superconductor PrPt4Ge12