High-finance approach to protecting tropical forests

Protecting climate with forests

Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that fram...

Tropical Forests

To understand where and why tropical forests exist, one must begin with some essential facts of geography and climatic systems. By definition, ‘the tropics’ lie between 238N and 238S latitude, the area within which the sun lies directly overhead at some point in its seasonal progression. Thefluxof solar energywithin this region is high, due to the fact that incoming sunlight is projected at a 9...

Tropical Rain Forests

Fragmentation and Tropical Forests

Model systems are needed to examine fragment area effects on food web structure where other factors are relatively constant. Human-induced fragmentation is typically associated with human activities, which may complicate interpretation of results from fragmentation studies. Forests on Hawai`i Island periodically experience a unique natural disturbance where lava flows into forests, leaving behi...

Biomass Prediction in Tropical Forests: The Canopy Grain Approach