AUTHOR=Darboe Sarata , Manneh Lamin , Stryamets Nataliya , Prūse Baiba , Pieroni Andrea , Sõukand Renata , Mattalia Giulia 

TITLE=“Forest is integral to life”: people-forest relations in the lower river region, the Gambia

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

VOLUME=Volume 6 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1181013

DOI=10.3389/ffgc.2023.1181013

ISSN=2624-893X

ABSTRACT=Forests play a crucial role in the lives of millions of people worldwide by providing material and non-material contributions. Despite forest's paramount importance from ecological, economic and cultural perspectives, the long-term relationship between forests and local communities living in their proximity is often an undervalued contribution to our understanding of local ecological knowledge systems and forest changes. 
We studied the interrelationships between the Mandinka peoples and forests in an understudied area of West Africa, the Gambia's Lower River Region (LRR). Through 35 semi-structured interviews, we documented the forests' contributions to local Mandinka peoples and their perception of forest changes. We also used geographic information systems (GIS software) to remote sensing satellite imagery to establish a baseline for these complex connections and changes. 
This research revealed the crucial importance of the forest's contributions to Mandinka communities and specifically to their psychological well-being . In addition, the interviewees revealed how ongoing socio-economic changes are affecting the human-forest relationship and possibly eroding the local ethnoforestry knowledge in the LRR of the Gambia.
The most common forests' contributions are those that provide material goods, serving as the driving force in connecting people with the forest, while non-materials contributions  are eroding due to complex socio-economic changes. Major socio-economic changes are also believed to drive the shift from dense forest to mixed forest and grassland.
In line with the state of the art, the knowledge and perception of changes documented in this article underline the quintessential need to include local communities' views in shaping forest management, in order to better fine-tune  the strategies to safeguard biocultural diversity across forest areas.