Forest Tenure

SUMMARYPrescribed burning in forestry is a valuable land management tool that has been extensively used in Australia, Eurasia, and North America. Nevertheless, fire is inherently dangerous and may impose risk upon humans, properties, and other natural resources.

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%.

The landscape surrounding Sudbury, Ontario, has been severely affected by 100 years of mining and forestry and a recent, large-scale ecological risk assessment found that terrestrial plant communities continue to be impaired by remnant metals and poor soil conditions.

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.

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.

This article explores evidence of deforestation and forest management practices in the Maya lowlands during the pre-Columbian period.

The impact of reforestation on water supplies is often considered in terms of impacts on water yields. In specific circumstances, reforestation will improve water quality, to the extent that previously unusable water can be utilised.

Human-induced soil degradation is a serious and complex environmental challenge in Iran. For a long time, human activities, namely the overuse of land, have been influencing the natural processes on and in soils; therefore, various types of soil degradation can be observed in many parts of the country.

There is vigorous debate about the potential for reforestation to offset losses in biodiversity associated with tropical deforestation, but a scarcity of good data. We quantified developmental trajectories following active restoration (replanting) of deforested pasture land to tropical Australian rainforest, using 20 different bird community indicators within chronosequences of multiple sites.

We assessed the extension of natural habitat conversion into croplands and grazing lands in subtropical NW Argentina and its impact on two key ecosystem functional attributes. We quantified changes in remotely sensed surrogates of aboveground net primary production (ANPP) and seasonality of carbon gains.

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion.

Industrial agricultural plantations are a rapidly increasing yet largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover change. Here, we evaluate impacts of oil palm plantation development on land cover, carbon flux, and agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo.