Full and effective participation of indigenous peoples and local communities, and high accuracy estimates are two current requirements for the purposes of monitoring forests at international level. We produced two land cover maps, both of which were based on digital image processing (decision trees) using Rapideye imagery, and a land cover participatory map, for indigenous territories of eastern Panama. Accuracy of the three maps was evaluated using field data.

Commitment of local communities to protected areas is essential for conserving biodiversity. However, in many developing countries like Benin, former management strategies kept human from protected areas using coercion. Fortunately, more recent regimes attempt to give local populations more control on the management but little is known about local residents' perceptions, beliefs and attitudes toward the management of these areas.

This study was conducted to examine the compatibility between the Sarawak Forest Ordinance and Bidayuh Native Customary Laws in Sarawak and to gather the community members’ opinions on the compatibility of these laws. This study was carried out using two research methods, viz. a literature review and a survey among the Bidayuh community in Bau, Sarawak. The documents reviewed were the Forest Ordinance Chapter 126 (1958) and the Adat Bidayuh Order, 1994.

One of the crucial questions which emerges in the context of REDD+ is how the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities will be protected. These rights include the rights of sharing in the financial benefits of REDD+, the rights to participate in decision-making around REDD+ schemes, and the rights to have their knowledge about forestry resources respected. Each of these issues depends on the extent to which they have some sort of claim to, or tenure over, tropical rainforests.

This article discusses some emerging models of Indigenous engagement in environmental management in New South Wales and urges expansion of such engagement. NSW Aboriginal people own only around one per cent of the state's land, which suggests that land ownership and rights-based approaches to Aboriginal participation in environmental management are insufficient in NSW. Alternative approaches that recognise Aboriginal responsibilities to ‘care for country’ are needed.

Large-scale development projects often overlap forest areas that support the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, threatening in situ conservation strategies for the protection of biological and cultural diversity. To address this problem, there is a need to integrate spatially-explicit information on ecosystem services into conservation planning. We present an approach for identifying conservation areas necessary to safeguard the provision of important ecosystem services for indigenous communities.

Agricultural and forest productive diversification depends on multiple socioeconomic drivers—like knowledge, migration, productive capacity, and market—that shape productive strategies and influence their ecological impacts. Our comparison of indigenous and settlers allows a better understanding of how societies develop different diversification strategies in similar ecological contexts and how the related socioeconomic aspects of diversification are associated with land cover change.

We use satellite imagery to compare and contrast fire patterns across a repeating mosaic of vegetation types occurring within the tropical savanna of the Northern Territory, Australia. Our study area included different land management settings that encapsulate three contrasting styles of management that have developed following European settlement in northern Australia: Decentralized fire management carried out by small Aboriginal communities widely dispersed across a large landscape.