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.

It is widely recognised that the appropriate representation for expert judgements of uncertainty is as a probability distribution for the unknown quantity of interest. However, formal elicitation of probability distributions is a non-trivial task. We provide an overview of this field, including an outline of the process of eliciting knowledge from experts in probabilistic form. We explore approaches to probabilistic uncertainty specification including direct elicitation and Bayesian analysis.

The availability during the last decades of remotely sensed images and global climatic data allow us to analyse the “Earth system” as a whole in order to develop concepts for global environmental management. This system can be considered a complex, dissipative, dynamic entity, far from thermodynamic equilibrium (Schellnhuber, 1999). Energy balance has been considered for many decades to understand the functioning of ecosystems, the biosphere or the Earth planet as a whole, but it is also possible to study our planet from a thermodynamic point of view.