The rapid environmental changes occurring in the Brazilian Amazon due to widespread deforestation have attracted the attention of the scientific community for several decades. A topic of particular interest involves the assessment of the combined impacts of selective logging and forest fires. Forest disturbances by selective logging and forest fires may vary in scale, from local to global changes, mostly related to the increase of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

We present quantitative reconstructions of regional vegetation cover in north‐western Europe, western Europe north of the Alps, and eastern Europe for five time windows in the Holocene [around 6k, 3k, 0.5k, 0.2k, and 0.05k calendar years before present (bp)] at a 1° × 1° spatial scale with the objective of producing vegetation descriptions suitable for climate modelling.

Borneo has experienced heavy deforestation and forest degradation during the past two decades. In this study the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer was used to monitor land cover change in Borneo between 2002 and 2005 in order to assess the current extent of the forest cover, the deforestation rate and the role of fire. Using Landsat and ground observation for validation it was possible to discriminate 11 land cover classes. In 2002 57% of the land surface of Borneo was covered with forest of which 74% was dipterocarp and more than 23% peat swamp forest.

Frequent human activities and climate change in the karst region of southwest China since the 1950s have led to the investigation of response of runoff to climate and catchment properties. Runoff coefficient (Rc) as an expression variable of the catchment response to rainfall is important to describe runoff dynamics and to estimate available streamflow for utilization. In this study, the equations of Rc associated with its attributors of climate condition and catchment property were derived using the Budyko framework.

In the Brazilian Amazon, private land accounts for the majority of remaining native vegetation. Understanding how land‐use change affects the composition and distribution of biodiversity in farmlands is critical for improving conservation strategies in the face of rapid agricultural expansion. Working across an area exceeding 3 million ha in the southwestern state of Rondônia, we assessed how the extent and configuration of remnant forest in replicate 10,000‐ha landscapes has affected the occurrence of a suite of Amazonian mammals and birds.

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil. It has also received considerable attention from environmental and social non-governmental organizations as a driver of deforestation and land consolidation. While many researchers have examined the impacts of soybean production on human and environmental landscapes, there has been little investigation into the economic and institutional context of Brazilian soybean production or the relationship between soy yields and planted area.

Processes of deforestation, known to threaten tropical forest biodiversity, have not yet been studied sufficiently in East Africa. To shed light on the patterns and causes of human influences on protected forest ecosystems, comparisons of different study areas regarding land cover dynamics and potential drivers are needed. We analyze the development of land cover since the early 1970s for three protected East African rainforests and their surrounding farmlands and assess the relationship between the observed changes in the context of the protection status of the forests.

This paper assesses strategic water availability and use under different development pathways on a basin scale using remote sensing (RS), geographical information systems (GIS) and a spatial water budget model (SWBM). The SWBM was applied to the Upper Ing Basin in northern Thailand to investigate the spatial and temporal variations in the location of streams and water yields from different parts of the basin. The base simulation was carried out for the years 1998–2007 using a DEM and actual land-use data at 100-m resolution.

Cloud forest in the Central Highlands of Guatemala provides important ecosystem services for the Q’eqchi’ Maya but has been disappearing at an increasing rate in recent decades. This research documents changes in cloud forest cover, explores some contributing factors to deforestation, and considers forest preservation and food security implications for Q’eqchi’ communities. We used a transdisciplinary framework that synthesized remote sensing/GIS analysis of land cover change, focus group dialogs, and surveys.

The northeastern China, the United States, and the western Europe are important agricultural regions both on the global and regional scales. The western Europe has a longer history of agricultural land development than the eastern United States. These two regions have changed from the deforestation and reclamation phase in the past to the current land abandonment and reforestation phase. Compared with the two regions, large-scale land exploitation has only been practiced in the northeastern China during the last century.

A desirable feature of a global sampling design for estimating forest cover change based on satellite imagery is the ability to adapt the design to obtain precise regional estimates, where a region may be a country, state, province, or conservation area. A sampling design stratified by an auxiliary variable correlated with forest cover change has this adaptability. A global stratified random sample can be augmented by additional sample units within a region selected by the same stratified protocol and the resulting sample constitutes a stratified random sample of the region.

Economic, agronomic, and biophysical drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need to be considered in evaluating economically optimal allocations of the world’s land resources. A dynamic, forward-looking optimization framework applied over the course of the coming century shows that although some deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of climate change regulation, the desirability of further deforestation is eliminated by mid-century.