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Displaying 1506 - 1510 of 1605Agroforestry and the search for alternatives to slash-and-burn cultivation: From technological optimism to a political economy of deforestation
Launched in 1994, the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn Programme is a multidisciplinary collaborative research effort aimed at addressing the issue of deforestation. This article analyzes the genesis and the history of this research effort and the causes of its successes and failures. I will show that despite the genuine commitment of the ASB Programme to achieve comprehensive analysis linking the social and the biophysical realms, its conclusions and recommendations were biased in favor of biophysical models whose adoption by farmers remained low.
Priority areas for the conservation of Atlantic forest large mammals
Large mammal faunas in tropical forest landscapes are widely affected by habitat fragmentation and hunting, yet the environmental determinants of their patterns of abundance remain poorly understood at large spatial scales. We analysed population abundance and biomass of 31 species of medium to large-bodied mammal species at 38 Atlantic forest sites (including three islands, 26 forest fragments and six continuous forest sites) as related to forest type, level of hunting pressure and forest fragment size using ANCOVAs.
Efficiency and effectiveness in representative reserve design in Canada: The contribution of existing protected areas
To be effective, reserve networks should represent all target species in protected areas that are large enough to ensure species persistence. Given limited resources to set aside protected areas for biodiversity conservation, and competing land uses, a prime consideration for the design of reserve networks is efficiency (the maximum biodiversity represented in a minimum number of sites). However, to be effective, networks may sacrifice efficiency.
Reserve selection with minimum contiguous area restrictions: An application to open space protection planning in suburban Chicago
Conservation efforts often require site or parcel selection strategies that lead to spatially cohesive reserves. Although habitat contiguity is thought to be conducive to the persistence of many sensitive species, availability of funding and suitable land may restrict the extent to which this spatial attribute can be pursued in land management or conservation. Using optimization modeling, we explore the economic and spatial tradeoffs of retaining or restoring grassland habitat in contiguous patches of various sizes near the Chicago metropolitan area.
Controls of land use and soil structure on water movement: Lessons for pollutant transfer through the unsaturated zone
To address the effects of land use and land cover (LULC) on soil structure formation and the significance on preferential flow during infiltration, dye tracer experiments were conducted on five sites differing in LULC, yet displaying similar soil textural characteristics and parent material. Two grassland sites, two farmland sites (tilled and untilled) and one site located in a deciduous forest were investigated. At each site, the same sprinkling experiment was carried out with a Brilliant Blue FCF solution of 4gL⁻¹ to visualize flow paths.