Untersuchungen zur Fachsprache der Ökologie und des Umweltschutzes im Deutschen und Finnischen : Bezeichnungsvarianten unter einem geschichtlichen, lexikographischen, morphologischen und linguistisch-pragmatischen Aspekt

The work integrates research in the language and terminology of various fields with lexicography, etymology, semantics, word formation, and pragmatics. Additionally, examination of German and Finnish provides the work with perspective of contrastive linguistics and the translation of texts in specialized fields. The work is an attempt to chart the language, vocabulary, different textual types, and essential communication-connected features of this special field. The study is primary concerned with internal communication within the field of ecology, but it also provides a comparison of the public discussion of environmental issues in Germany and Finland. The work attempts to use textual signs to provide a picture of the literary communication used on the different vertical levels in the central text types within the field. The dictionaries in the fields of environmental issues and ecology for the individual text types are examined primarily from the perspective of their quantity and diversity. One central point of the work is to clarify and collect all of the dictionaries in the field that have been compiled thus far in which German and/or Finnish ware included. Ecology and environmental protection are closely linked not only to each other but also to many other scientific fields. Consequently, the language of the environmental field has acquired an abundance of influences and vocabulary from the language of the special fields close to it as well as from that of politics and various areas of public administration. The work also demonstrates how the popularization of environmental terminology often leads to semantic distortion. Traditionally, scientific texts have used the smallest number of expressions, the purpose of which is to appeal to or influence the behavior of the text recipient. Particularly in Germany, those who support or oppose measures to protect the environment have long been making concerted efforts to represent their own views in the language that they use. When discussing controversial issues competing designations for the same referent or concept are used in accordance with the interest group to which the speaker belongs. One of the objectives of the study is to sensitize recipients of texts to notice the euphemistic expressions that occur in German and Finnish texts dealing with issues that are sensitive from the standpoint of environmental policy. One particular feature of the field is the wealth and large number of variants designating the same entry or concept. The terminological doublets formed by words of foreign origin and their German or Finnish language equivalents are quite typical of the field. Methods of corpus linguistics are used to determine the reasons for the large number of variant designations as well as their functionality.

Zur Sättigung der Valenz in den Kleinen Meldungen des Typus Notiz : Eine pragmatisch fundierte Analyse

Valency Realization in Short Excerpts of News Text. A Pragmatics-funded analysis This dissertation is a study of the so-called pragmatic valency. The aim of the study is to examine the phenomenon both theoretically by discussing the research literature and empirically based on evidence from a text corpus consisting of 218 short excerpts of news text from the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In the theoretical part of the study, the central concepts of the valency and the pragmatic valency are discussed. In the research literature, the valency denotes the relation among the verb and its obligatory and optional complements. The pragmatic valency can be defined as modification of the so-called system valency in the parole, including non-realization of an obligatory complement, non- realization of an optional complement and realization of an optional complement. Furthermore, the investigation of the pragmatic valency includes the role of the adjuncts, elements that are not defined by the valency, in the concrete valency realization. The corpus study investigates the valency behaviour of German verbs in a corpus of about 1500 sentences combining the methodology and concepts of valency theory, semantics and text linguistics. The analysis is focused on the about 600 sentences which show deviations from the system valency, providing over 800 examples for the modification of the system valency as codified in the (valency) dictionaries. The study attempts to answer the following primary question: Why is the system valency modified in the parole? To answer the question, the concept of modification types is entered. The modification types are recognized using distinctive feature bundles in which each feature with a negative or a positive value refers to one reason for the modification treated in the research literature. For example, the features of irrelevance and relevance, focus, world and text type knowledge, text theme, theme-rheme structure and cohesive chains are applied. The valency approach appears in a new light when explored through corpus-based investigation; both the optionality of complements and the distinction between complements and adjuncts as defined in the present valency approach seem in some respects defective. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that the adjuncts outside the valency domain play a central role in the concrete realization of the valency. Finally, the study suggests a definition of pragmatic valency, based on the modification types introduced in the study and tested in the corpus analysis.

La contextualisation du discours radiophonique par des moyens prosodiques. L’exemple de cinq grands philosophes français du XXe siècle

"Radiodiskurssin kontekstualisointi prosodisin keinoin. Esimerkkinä viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia" Väitöskirja käsittelee puheen kontekstualisointia prosodisin keinoin. Toisin sanottuna työssä käsitellään sitä, miten puheen prosodiset piirteet (kuten sävelkulku, intensiteetti, tauot, kesto ja rytmi) ohjaavat puheen tulkintaa vanhastaan enemmän tutkittujen sana- ja lausemerkitysten ohella. Työssä keskitytään seitsemään prosodisesti merkittyyn kuvioon, jotka koostuvat yhden tai usean parametrin silmiinpistävistä muutoksista. Ilmiöitä käsitellään sekä niiden akustisten muotojen että tyypillisten esiintymisyhteyksien ja diskursiivisten tehtävien näkökulmasta. Aineisto koostuu radio-ohjelmista, joissa puhuu viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia: Gaston Bachelard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty ja Jean-Paul Sartre. Ohjelmat on lähetetty eri radiokanavilla Ranskassa vuosina 1948–1973. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että prosodisesti merkityt kuviot ovat moniulotteisia puheen ilmiöitä, joilla on keskeinen rooli sanotun kontekstualisoinnissa: ne voivat esimerkiksi nostaa tai laskea sanotun informaatioarvoa, ilmaista puhujan voimakasta tai heikkoa sitoutumista sanomaansa, ilmaista rakenteellisen kokonaisuuden jatkumista tai päättymistä, jne. Väitöskirja sisältää myös kontrastiivisia osia, joissa ilmiöitä verrataan erääseen klassisessa pianomusiikissa esiintyvään melodiseen kuvioon sekä erääseen suomen kielen prosodiseen ilmiöön. Tulokset viittaavat siihen, että tietynlaista melodista kuviota käytetään samankaltaisena jäsentämiskeinona sekä puheessa että klassisessa musiikissa. Lisäksi tulokset antavat viitteitä siitä, että tiettyjä melodisia muotoja käytetään samankaltaisten implikaatioiden luomiseen kahdessa niinkin erilaisessa kielessä kuin suomessa ja ranskassa. Yksi väitöskirjan osa käsittelee pisteen ja pilkun prosodista merkitsemistä puheessa. Tulosten mukaan pisteellä ja pilkulla on kummallakin oma suullinen prototyyppinsä: piste merkitään tyypillisesti sävelkulun laskulla ja tauolla, ja pilkku puolestaan sävelkulun nousulla ja tauolla. Merkittävimmät tulokset koskevat kuitenkin tapauksia, joissa välimerkki tulkitaan prosodisesti epätyypillisellä tavalla: sekä pisteellä että pilkulla vaikuttaisi olevan useita eri suullisia vastaavuuksia, ja välimerkkien tehtävät voivat muotoutua hyvin erilaisiksi niiden prosodisesta tulkinnasta riippuen.

« Le roman est agréablement traduit » : Étude comparative sur la visibilité des traductions et des traducteurs en Finlande et en France à travers des critiques des livres

Pro gradu -työssä tutkitaan ja vertaillaan käännöskirjallisuuden arvosteluja Ranskassa ja Suomessa. Empiirinen aineisto koostuu kaikista Helsingin Sanomien ja Le Monden vuonna 2003 julkaisemista arvosteluista. Lehdissä oli yhteensä 2691 arvosteltua kirjaa, joista 845 oli käännöksiä. Päätavoite on ollut selvittää näiden valtasanomalehtien kritiikkejä tutkimalla, kummassa maassa kääntäjän ja käännöksen asema on näkyvämpi ja minkälaisia julkaistut käännöskritiikit ovat. Lisäksi tavoitteena on ollut tutkia, kumpi lehdistä on avoimempi vieraskielisiä kirjoja ja käännöksiä kohtaan. Kirja-arvostelujen lähemmälle tutkimiselle luodaan pohjaa perehtymällä kääntäjän ja käännöksen näkyvyyteen liittyviin seikkoihin. Tässä käytetään hyväksi Koskisen (2000) tutkimusta. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan myös, millainen on hyvä käännös eri kääntäjien ja tutkijoiden mielestä, sekä muita saman aihepiirin tutkimuksia ja aiheesta vallalla ollutta keskustelua. Lisäksi selvitetään, miksi laadukkaat käännösarvostelut ovat harvinaisia ja mistä tämä johtuu. Analyysivaiheen kvantitatiivisessa osassa perehdytään käännösten määrälliseen osuuteen sekä aineistossa että Ranskan ja Suomen kokonaisjulkaisumäärissä. Aineiston käännösarvostelut luokitellaan niiden sisällön mukaan. Tässä on käytetty soveltuvin osin Gullinin (1998) kehittelemää mallia. Käännösarvostelujen sisältöanalyysissa kiinnitetään huomiota niiden käännöstä ja kääntäjää koskeviin kommentteihin. Arvostelujen laadun ja kriitikkojen käyttämien arvosteluperusteiden pohdinta nojautuu aiheesta aikaisemmin tehtyihin teoreettisiin sekä empiirisiin tutkimuksiin. Pro gradu -työ sisältää myös erillisen katsauksen käännettyjen lastenkirjojen arvosteluihin sekä arvostelujen ulkopuolisiin kääntäjiin ja kääntämiseen liittyviin artikkeleihin. Koko tutkimuksen ajan lähestymistapa on vertaileva Le Monden ja Helsingin Sanomien välillä. Tutkimuksesta selviää, että Le Monde julkaisee huomattavasti enemmän kirja-arvosteluja. Molemmat lehdet sisältävät kuitenkin suhteellisesti yhtä paljon arvosteluja käännöskirjoista. Helsingin Sanomissa on enemmän vieraskielisten teosten arvosteluja, ja käännösten ja kääntäjän asema on huomattavasti näkyvämpi lehden kritiikeissä. Suurin osa Le Monden käännösarvosteluista sisältää vain kääntäjän nimen bibliografisissa tiedoissa. Helsingin Sanomissa vain alle puolet käännöskirjoista on arvosteltu tällä tavoin. Myös kritiikit, joissa kääntäjän nimeä ei mainita ollenkaan, ovat yleisempiä ranskalaislehdessä. Suhteellisen pieni osa käännösarvosteluista arvioi käännöksen laatua. Näille arvioille on ominaista perustelujen ja analyysin puuttuminen ja ne ovat usein lyhyitä. Arviot ovat sävyltään enimmäkseen positiivisia tai neutraaleja. Hyvin yleistä on myös se, että kriitikko sekoittaa kaksi eri asiaa: kääntäjän ja kirjailijan tyylin. Yleisin kriitikkojen käyttämä arviointikriteeri on tutkia käännöksen ja kohdekielen tai käännöksen ja lähtötekstin suhdetta. Monesti arviointikriteeri jää täysin epäselväksi. Helsingin Sanomien kritiikeissä kääntäjiin viitataan huomattavasti useammin myös itse arvostelutekstissä. Lehti tuo näkyvästi esille kääntäjiä muissakin kuin kirja-arvosteluartikkeleissaan. Sen sijaan Le Mondessa ei ole pelkästään kääntäjiä käsitteleviä tekstejä.

Community forestry and environmental literacy in northern Thailand : Towards collaborative natural resource management and conservation

Conservation and sustainable management of tropical forests needs a holistic approach: in addition to ecological concerns, socio-economic issues including cultural aspects must be taken into consideration. An ability to adapt practices is a key to successful collaborative natural resource management. Achieving this requires local participation and understanding of local conceptions of the environment. This study examined these issues in the context of northern Thailand. Northern uplands are the home of much of the remaining natural forest in Thailand and several ethnic minority groups commonly referred to as hill tribes. The overall purpose of this study was to grasp a regional view of an ethnically diverse forested area and to elicit prospects to develop community forestry for conservation purposes and for securing people s livelihood. Conservation was a central goal of management as the forests in the area were largely designated as protected. The aim was to study local perceptions, objectives, values and practices of forest management, under the umbrella of the concept environmental literacy, as well as the effects of forest policy on community management goals and activities. Environmental literacy refers to holistic understanding of the environment. It was used as a tool to examine people s views, interests, knowledge and motivation associated to forests. The material for this study was gathered in six villages in Chiang Mai Province. Three minority groups were included in the study, the Karen, Hmong and Lawa, and also the Thai. Household and focus group interviews were conducted in the villages. In addition, officials at district, regional and national levels, workers of non-governmental organisations, and academics were interviewed, and some data were gathered from the students of a local school. The results showed that motivation for protecting the forests existed among each ethnic group studied. This was a result of culture and traditions evolved in the forest environment but also of a need to adapt to a changed situation and environment and to outside pressures. The consequences of deforestation were widely agreed on in the villages, and the impact of socio-economic changes on the forests and livelihood was also recognised. The forest was regarded as a source of livelihood providing land, products and services essential to the people inhabiting rural uplands. Traditions, fire control, cooperation, reforestation, separation of protected and utilisable areas, and rules were viewed as central for conservation. For the villagers, however, conservation meant sustainable use, whereas the government has tended to prefer strict restrictions on forest resource use. Thus, conflicts had arisen. Between communities, cooperation was more dominant than conflict. The results indicated that the heterogeneity of forest dwellers, although it has to be recognised, should not be overemphasised: ethnic diversity can be considered as no major obstacle for successful community forestry. Collaborative management is particularly important in protected areas in order to meet the conservation goals while providing opportunities for livelihood. Forest management needs more positive incentives and increased dialogue.

Integrating biodiversity conservation into forestry : an empirical analysis of institutional adaptation

Integrating biodiversity conservation into forest management in non-industrial private forests requires changes in the practices of those public and private actors that have implementing responsibilities and whose strategic and operational opportunities are at stake. Understanding this kind of context-dependent institutional adaptation requires bridging between two analytical approaches: policy implementation and organizational adaptation, backed up with empirical analysis. The empirical analyses recapitulated in this thesis summary address organizational competences, specialization, professional judgment, and organizational networks. The analyses utilize qualitative and quantitative data from public and private sector organizations as well as associations. The empirical analyses produced stronger signals of policy implementation than of organizational adaptation. The organizations recognized the policy and social demand for integrating biodiversity conservation into forest management and their professionals were in favor of conserving biodiversity. However, conservation was integrated to forest management so tightly that it could be said to be subsumed by mainstream forestry. The organizations had developed some competences for conservation but the competences did not differentiate among the organizations other than illustrating the functional differences between industry, administration and associations. The networks that organizations depended on consisted of traditional forestry actors and peers both in planning policy and at the operational level. The results show that he demand for biodiversity conservation has triggered incremental changes in organizations. They can be considered inert regarding this challenge. Isomorphism is advanced by hierarchical guidance and standardization, and by professional norms. Analytically, this thesis contributes to the understanding of organizational behavior across the public and private sector boundaries. The combination of a policy implementation approach inherent in analysis of public policies in hierarchical administration settings, and organizational adaptation typically applied to private sector organizations, highlights the importance of institutional interpretation. Institutional interpretation serves the understanding of the empirically identified diversions from the basic tenets of the two approaches. Attention to institutions allows identification of the overlap of the traditionally segregated approaches.

Participation or further exclusion? : Contestations over forest conservation and control in the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania

This Ph.D. thesis Participation or Further Exclusion? Contestations over Forest Conservation and Control in the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania describes and analyses the shift in the prevailing discourse of forest and biodiversity conservation policies and strategies towards more participatory approaches in Tanzania, and the changes in the practises of resource control. I explore the scope for and limits to the different actors and groups who are considered to form the community, to participate in resource control, in a specific historical and socio-economic context. I analyse whether, how and to which extent the targets of such participatory conservation interventions have been able to affect the formal rules and practices of resource control, and explore their different responses and discursive and other strategies in relation to conservation efforts. I approach the problematic through exploring certain participatory conservation interventions and related negotiations between the local farmers, government officials and the external actors in the case of two protected forest reserves in the southern part of the East Usambaras, Tanzania. The study area belongs to the Eastern Arc Mountains that are valued globally and nationally for their high level of biodiversity and number of endemic and near endemic species. The theoretical approach draws from theorising on power, participation and conservation in anthropology of development and post-structuralist political ecology. The material was collected in three stages between 2003 and 2008 by using an ethnographic approach. I interviewed and observed the actors and their resource use and control practices at the local level, including the representatives of the villagers living close to the protected forests and the conservation agency, but also followed the selected processes and engaged with the non-local agencies involved in the conservation efforts in the East Usambaras. In addition, the more recent processes of change and the actors strategies in resource control were contextualised against the social and environmental history of the study area and the evolvement of institutions of natural resource control. My findings indicate that the discourse of participation that has emerged in global conservation policy debate within the past three decades, and is being institutionalised in the national policies in many countries, including Tanzania, has shaped the practices of forest conservation in the East Usambaras, although in a fragmented and uneven way. Instrumental interpretation of participation, in which it is to serve the goals of improving the control of the forest and making it more acceptable and efficient, has prevailed among the governmental actors and conservation organisations. Yet, there is variation between the different projects and actors promoting participatory conservation regarding the goals and means of participation, e.g. to which extent the local people are to be involved in decision-making. The actors representing communities also have their diverse agendas, understandings and experiences regarding the rationality, outcomes and benefits of being involved in forest control, making the practices of control fluid. The elements of the exclusive conservation thinking and practices co-exist with the more recent participatory processes, and continue to shape the understandings and strategies of the actors involved in resource control. The ideas and narratives of the different discourses are reproduced and selectively used by the parties involved. The idea of forest conservation is not resisted as such by most of the actors at local level, quite the opposite. However, the strict regulations and rules governing access to resources, such as valuable timber species, continue to be disputed by many. Furthermore, the history of control, such as past injustices related to conservation and unfulfilled promises, undermines the participation of certain social groups in resource control and benefit sharing. This also creates controversies in the practices of conservation, and fuels conflicts regarding the establishment of new protected areas. In spite of this, the fact that the representatives of the communities have been invited to the arenas where information is shared, and principles and conditions of forest control and benefit sharing are discussed and partly decided upon, has created expectations among the participants, and opened up opportunities for some of the local actors to enhance their own, and sometimes wider interests in relation to resource control and the related benefits. The local actors experiences of the previous government and other interventions strongly affect how they position themselves in relation to conservation interventions, and their responses and strategies. However, my findings also suggest, in a similar way to research conducted in some other protected areas, that the benefits of participation in conservation and resource control tend to accrue unevenly between different groups of local people, e.g. due to unequal access to information and differences in their initial resources and social position.

Conservation of Atlantic salmon by supplementary stocking of juvenile fish

Wild salmon stocks in the northern Baltic rivers became endangered in the second half of the 20th century, mainly due to recruitment overfishing. As a result, supplementary stocking was widely practised, and supplementation of the Tornionjoki salmon stock took place over a 25 year period until 2002. The stock has been closely monitored by electrofishing, smolt trapping, mark-recapture studies, catch samples and catch surveys. Background information on hatchery-reared stocked juveniles was also collected for this study. Bayesian statistics was applied to the data as this method offers the possibility of bringing prior information into the analysis and an advanced ability for incorporating uncertainty, and also provides probabilities for a multitude of hypotheses. Substantial divergences between reared and wild Tornionjoki salmon were identified in both demographic and phenological characteristics. The divergences tended to be larger the longer the duration spent in hatchery and the more favourable the hatchery conditions were for fast growth. Differences in environment likely induced most of the divergences, but selection of brood fish might have resulted in genotypic divergence in maturation age of reared salmon. Survival of stocked 1-year old juveniles to smolt varied from about 10% to about 25%. Stocking on the lower reach of the river seemed to decrease survival, and the negative effect of stocking volume on survival raises the concern of possible similar effects on the extant wild population. Post-smolt survival of wild Tornionjoki smolts was on average two times higher than that of smolts stocked as parr and 2.5 times higher than that of stocked smolts. Smolts of different groups showed synchronous variation and similar long-term survival trends. Both groups of reared salmon were more vulnerable to offshore driftnet and coastal trapnet fishing than wild salmon. Average survival from smolt to spawners of wild salmon was 2.8 times higher than that of salmon stocked as parr and 3.3 times higher than that of salmon stocked as smolts. Wild salmon and salmon stocked as parr were found to have similar lifetime survival rates, while stocked smolts have a lifetime survival rate over 4 times higher than the two other groups. If eggs are collected from the wild brood fish, stocking parr would therefore not be a sensible option. Stocking smolts instead would create a net benefit in terms of the number of spawners, but this strategy has serious drawbacks and risks associated with the larger phenotypic and demographic divergences from wild salmon. Supplementation was shown not to be the key factor behind the recovery of the Tornionjoki and other northern Baltic salmon stocks. Instead, a combination of restrictions in the sea fishery and simultaneous occurrence of favourable natural conditions for survival were the main reasons for the revival in the 1990 s. This study questions the effectiveness of supplementation as a conservation management tool. The benefits of supplementation seem at best limited. Relatively high occurrences of reared fish in catches may generate false optimism concerning the effects of supplementation. Supplementation may lead to genetic risks due to problems in brood fish collection and artificial rearing with relaxed natural selection and domestication. Appropriate management of fisheries is the main alternative to supplementation, without which all other efforts for long-term maintenance of a healthy fish resource fail.

Species-based and community-level approaches to conservation prioritization

One major reason for the global decline of biodiversity is habitat loss and fragmentation. Conservation areas can be designed to reduce biodiversity loss, but as resources are limited, conservation efforts need to be prioritized in order to achieve best possible outcomes. The field of systematic conservation planning developed as a response to opportunistic approaches to conservation that often resulted in biased representation of biological diversity. The last two decades have seen the development of increasingly sophisticated methods that account for information about biodiversity conservation goals (benefits), economical considerations (costs) and socio-political constraints. In this thesis I focus on two general topics related to systematic conservation planning. First, I address two aspects of the question about how biodiversity features should be valued. (i) I investigate the extremely important but often neglected issue of differential prioritization of species for conservation. Species prioritization can be based on various criteria, and is always goal-dependent, but can also be implemented in a scientifically more rigorous way than what is the usual practice. (ii) I introduce a novel framework for conservation prioritization, which is based on continuous benefit functions that convert increasing levels of biodiversity feature representation to increasing conservation value using the principle that more is better. Traditional target-based systematic conservation planning is a special case of this approach, in which a step function is used for the benefit function. We have further expanded the benefit function framework for area prioritization to address issues such as protected area size and habitat vulnerability. In the second part of the thesis I address the application of community level modelling strategies to conservation prioritization. One of the most serious issues in systematic conservation planning currently is not the deficiency of methodology for selection and design, but simply the lack of data. Community level modelling offers a surrogate strategy that makes conservation planning more feasible in data poor regions. We have reviewed the available community-level approaches to conservation planning. These range from simplistic classification techniques to sophisticated modelling and selection strategies. We have also developed a general and novel community level approach to conservation prioritization that significantly improves on methods that were available before. This thesis introduces further degrees of realism into conservation planning methodology. The benefit function -based conservation prioritization framework largely circumvents the problematic phase of target setting, and allowing for trade-offs between species representation provides a more flexible and hopefully more attractive approach to conservation practitioners. The community-level approach seems highly promising and should prove valuable for conservation planning especially in data poor regions. Future work should focus on integrating prioritization methods to deal with multiple aspects in combination influencing the prioritization process, and further testing and refining the community level strategies using real, large datasets.

Ecology, population genetics and conservation of the African violet

The ongoing rapid fragmentation of tropical forests is a major threat to global biodiversity. This is because many of the tropical forests are so-called biodiversity 'hotspots', areas that host exceptional species richness and concentrations of endemic species. Forest fragmentation has negative ecological and genetic consequences for plant survival. Proposed reasons for plant species' loss in forest fragments are, e.g., abiotic edge effects, altered species interactions, increased genetic drift, and inbreeding depression. To be able to conserve plants in forest fragments, the ecological and genetic processes that threaten the species have to be understood. That is possible only after obtaining adequate information on their biology, including taxonomy, life history, reproduction, and spatial and genetic structure of the populations. In this research, I focused on the African violet (genus Saintpaulia), a little-studied conservation flagship from the Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests hotspot of Tanzania and Kenya. The main objective of the research was to increase understanding of the life history, ecology and population genetics of Saintpaulia that is needed for the design of appropriate conservation measures. A further aim was to provide population-level insights into the difficult taxonomy of Saintpaulia. Ecological field work was conducted in a relatively little fragmented protected forest in the Amani Nature Reserve in the East Usambara Mountains, in northeastern Tanzania, complemented by population genetic laboratory work and ecological experiments in Helsinki, Finland. All components of the research were conducted with Saintpaulia ionantha ssp. grotei, which forms a taxonomically controversial population complex in the study area. My results suggest that Saintpaulia has good reproductive performance in forests with low disturbance levels in the East Usambara Mountains. Another important finding was that seed production depends on sufficient pollinator service. The availability of pollinators should thus be considered in the in situ management of threatened populations. Dynamic population stage structures were observed suggesting that the studied populations are demographically viable. High mortality of seedlings and juveniles was observed during the dry season but this was compensated by ample recruitment of new seedlings after the rainy season. Reduced tree canopy closure and substrate quality are likely to exacerbate seedling and juvenile mortality, and, therefore, forest fragmentation and disturbance are serious threats to the regeneration of Saintpaulia. Restoration of sufficient shade to enhance seedling establishment is an important conservation measure in populations located in disturbed habitats. Long-term demographic monitoring, which enables the forecasting of a population s future, is also recommended in disturbed habitats. High genetic diversities were observed in the populations, which suggest that they possess the variation that is needed for evolutionary responses in a changing environment. Thus, genetic management of the studied populations does not seem necessary as long as the habitats remain favourable for Saintpaulia. The observed high levels of inbreeding in some of the populations, and the reduced fitness of the inbred progeny compared to the outbred progeny, as revealed by the hand-pollination experiment, indicate that inbreeding and inbreeding depression are potential mechanisms contributing to the extinction of Saintpaulia populations. The relatively weak genetic divergence of the three different morphotypes of Saintpaulia ionantha ssp. grotei lend support to the hypothesis that the populations in the Usambara/lowlands region represent a segregating metapopulation (or metapopulations), where subpopulations are adapting to their particular environments. The partial genetic and phenological integrity, and the distinct trailing habit of the morphotype 'grotei' would, however, justify its placement in a taxonomic rank of its own, perhaps in a subspecific rank.