WHAT FUTURE FOR ASIA’S LOWLAND TROPICAL EVERGREEN FORESTS?

Humus forms in two secondary semi-evergreen tropical forests

The future of tropical forests.

Five anthropogenic drivers--land use change, wood extraction, hunting, atmospheric change, climate change--will largely determine the future of tropical forests. The geographic scope and intensity of these five drivers are in flux. Contemporary land use change includes deforestation (approximately 64,000 km(2) yr(-1) for the entire tropical forest biome) and natural forests regenerating on aban...

Phenology-Based Method for Mapping Tropical Evergreen Forests by Integrating of MODIS and Landsat Imagery

Updated extent, area, and spatial distribution of tropical evergreen forests from inventory data provides valuable knowledge for research of the carbon cycle, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in tropical regions. However, acquiring these data in mountainous regions requires labor-intensive, often cost-prohibitive field protocols. Here, we report about validated methods to rapidly identify t...

A Simple Algorithm for Large-Scale Mapping of Evergreen Forests in Tropical America, Africa and Asia

The areal extent and spatial distribution of evergreen forests in the tropical zones are important for the study of climate, carbon cycle and biodiversity. However, frequent cloud cover in the tropical regions makes mapping evergreen forests a challenging task. In this study we developed a simple and novel mapping algorithm that is based on the temporal profile analysis of Land Surface Water In...

What Futures for the People of the Tropical Forests?

The importance of forest products to the households who live in or close to the forests has been increasingly recognised over the past ten years. The numbers of people who in some way rely on the forest for survival or livelihood inputs is difficult to assess, and estimates vary widely. The authors of this paper argue that these are not the most appropriate measures of the importance of forests...