We used land‐cover maps and active fire detection based on satellite imagery to evaluate the rates and spatial distribution of peatland deforestation in Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2010. Over this time period, the proportion of forest cover in the peatlands of Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo fell from 77% to 36%. After two decades of extensive deforestation (31 000 km²; 4.9% yr⁻¹) strongly associated with fire activity, Sumatra has been left with just 28% of its historical forested peatlands.

Community assembly rules have been extensively studied, but its association with regional environmental variation and land use history remains largely unexplored. Land use history might be especially important in Mediterranean forests, considering their historical deforestation and recent afforestation.

SUMMARYIn this article we discuss the two largest reforestation and forest conservation programmes in China, the Natural Forest Protection Programme (NFPP), and the Slope Land Conversion Programme (SLCP, also called Grain for Green), introduced in 1998. The NFPP reformed the state forest enterprises to reduce deforestation, increase the amount of forestland to be protected, and increase the sustainability of logging, while improving their financial viability. The SLCP reformed collective (i.e.

The Belgian climate policy is formulated at the federal level, requiring cooperation between regional and federal administrations. Around a fifth of the total area of Belgium is covered by forests. Around 80/ of the productive forests are in the Walloon region. Reported values for land use change and forestry categories give a potential of 2,057 kt eq. CO2 per year. Given the existing regional forest inventories (RFI): RFI1 for 1984 and RFI2 for 1999, an estimate has been made to consolidate reported data.

Madagascar is often portrayed as a global environmental hotspot with widespread deforestation and environmental degradation. Quantitative and spatially explicit data on ecological change are, however, scarce and current estimates are often based on simplistic representations of deforestation and land use change. Significant uncertainties in current estimates therefore remain. The present study was conducted to assess deforestation and other important complex land use change trajectories in the eastern highlands of Madagascar.

Conservationists have proposed that maintaining key elements of the original land-cover type in modified landscapes may mitigate the detrimental effects of land-cover change on residual species. We tested this hypothesis for aquatic insect communities in tank-forming bromeliads in forested and non-forested habitats in Costa Rica. Bromeliad tanks hold much of the standing water in this region and therefore provide an important resource for insects with aquatic larval stages.

This study uses a combination of Landsat series data (Multispectral Scanner or MSS, Thematic Mapper or TM and Enhanced Thematic Mapper or ETM+) to map land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) from 1975 to 2001. It extends the land change record to 2008 using Chinese–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS)-2 and CBERS-2B data on a multi-scene level. It also establishes a methodology to correct for systematic distortion inherent in CBERS imagery without the loss of information present in Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery post-2003.

Although protected areas in Africa contain possibly the highest repositories of carbon and thus can play a role in mitigating the effects of climate change through carbon sequestration, they are threatened due to increasing levels of deforestation and forest degradation (DFD). However, little information is available on the on-site causes of DFD in these areas. This paper estimates the levels of DFD and identifies the drivers in the Ankasa Conservation Area (ACA) in Ghana as a case study. A survey was used to identify both direct and underlying factors that promote the DFD.

Indonesia has set the target that by the year 2020 its emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced by 26 per cent relative to business-as-usual conditions. This article analyses the effectiveness of a subsidy to the use of land in forestry as a means of achieving this goal. The analysis uses a general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy characterised by explicit treatment of land use, disaggregated by industry and by region.

Employing rangelands for climate change mitigation is hindered by conflicting reports on the direction and magnitude of change in soil organic carbon (ΔSOC) following changes in woody cover. Publications on woody thickening and deforestation, which had led to uncertainty in ΔSOC, were re-evaluated, and the dimensional-dependence of their data was determined. To model the fundamentals of SOC flux, linked SOC pools were simulated with first-order kinetics. Influences from forest development timelines and location of mature trees, with a potential for deep-set roots, were considered.

This article explores evidence of deforestation and forest management practices in the Maya lowlands during the pre-Columbian period. In the early twentieth century, scholars first began to examine the role of the environment in the rise and collapse of the great southern Maya polities of the Classic period, proposing that deforestation was an important factor in their political fragmentation and depopulation between the eighth and tenth centuries. In the last twenty-five years, this hypothesis has gained broad acceptance largely due to research at the ancient city of Copan, Honduras.