Table 2 Second sections of topics constituted of clusters of questions dealing with these topics for mangrove villagers in three villages adjacent to the Douala-Edea reserve

B1. Socio-demographic and economic attributes of the villager (incl. age, religion, marital status, household composition, years of life in village, profession, family income source, and assets of the family). This was asked at the end of each interview.

B2. An objective assessment of the interviewee's knowledge on mangroves (in the text referred to as 'mangrove knowledge') was made by asking the person to identify which mangroves were around using plants parts freshly collected from the field and scoring the correctness as described by Dahdouh-Guebas et al. [9].

B3. The general utilisation of mangroves gave a first idea of uses in general. Although no further focus, here we inquired also for non-wood forest product uses such as medicinal or alimentary utilization of the mangrove.

B4. Detailed questions on fuelwood use, investigating genera used, their quality, their part and size used. We also asked for reasons of use and for any alternative fuelwood uses. Who and how much was used was also part of the survey.

B5. The same was repeated for construction and service wood.

B6. The same was repeated for fine timber (for furniture, crafts and arts).

B7. Personal assessment of the interviewee's perception on changes in the mangrove forest was gained by asking questions on change in area, in mangrove species composition and on opinion reasons for this. We also asked them about their opinion of the future.