ABSTRACT
Home gardens represent one of the earliest types of land use in many parts of the world and are often an integral part of the bio-physical and cultural landscape. They are an important asset for the poor and marginalized groups in society and play an important role in contributing to food security and nutrition and other aspects of well-being including income generation. Home gardens represent a dense and dynamic multistoried arrangement often with a combination of mixed but compatible species, and as such they are critical spaces harboring high levels of biodiversity. People grow a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, root and tuber crops, fodder and medicinal plants as well as other economically important plant species providing spices, flowers and building materials. Livestock, poultry, small fishponds and bees can also be found in many home gardens. In addition to this high inter-specific diversity, home gardens are important repositories for significant intra-specific biodiversity, especially of plant genetic resources and are often home to important and unique traditional crop varieties and landraces. In fact, home gardens are often sites of many species, crop varieties and landraces that are not commonly found in larger fields or the wider farming system. Home gardens therefore represent an important element of any strategy to conserve biodiversity. Further, farmer experimentation is common in home gardens, and the composition and structure of plant and animal species found is largely a result of farmer evaluation and selection, exchange and management. This chapter will review the current literature on the role and importance of home gardens in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.
