How avifauna respond to the long-term loss and fragmentation of tropical forests is a critical issue in biodiversity management. We use data from over 30 years to gain insights into such changes in the northernmost Neotropical rainforest in the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas of southern Veracruz, Mexico. This region has been extensively deforested over the past half-century. The Estación de Biología Tro...

Anthropogenic deforestation in tropical countries is responsible for a significant part of global carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. To plan efficient climate change mitigation programs (such as REDD+, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), reliable forecasts of deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions are necessary. Although population density has been recogn...

Recent proposals to compensate developing countries for reducing emissions from deforestation (RED) under forthcoming climate change mitigation regimes are receiving increasing attention. Here we demonstrate that if RED credits were traded on international carbon markets, even moderate decreases in deforestation rates could generate billions of Euros annually for tropical forest conservation. W...

Loss of large areas of Amazonian forest, through either direct human impact or climate change, could exert a number of influences on the regional and global climates. In the Met Office Hadley Centre coupled climate-carbon cycle model, a severe drying of this region initiates forest loss that exerts a number of feedbacks on global and regional climates, which magnify the drying and the forest de...

Deforestation, as one of the challenging environmental problems in the world, has been recorded the most serious threat to environmental diversity and one of the main components of land-use change. In this paper, we investigate spatial distribution of deforestation using artificial neural networks and satellite imagery. Modeling deforestation can be conducted considering various factors in dete...

This thesis investigates the question how emissions from land-use displacement can be assessed and accounted for, using the example of carbon-leakage accounting in the planned UNFCCC mechanism on ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD). REDD serves here as example of an international forest conservation policy that might be effective locally but could lead to displ...

Human management of anthropogenic environments and species is tightly linked to the ecology and evolution of plants gathered by humans. This is certainly the case for wild food plants, which exist on a continuum of human management. Given alarming deforestation rates, wild food plant gathering is increasingly occurring in anthropogenic ecosystems, where farmers actively manage these species in ...

Controlling deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region has long been illusive despite repeated efforts of government authorities to slow the process. From 1997 to 2000, deforestation rates in Brazil's 9-state "Legal Amazon" region continually crept upward. Now, a licensing and enforcement program for clearing by large farmers and ranchers in the state of Mato Grosso appears to be having an effect....

Safeguarding the world's remaining forests is a high-priority goal. We assess the biophysical option space for feeding the world in 2050 in a hypothetical zero-deforestation world. We systematically combine realistic assumptions on future yields, agricultural areas, livestock feed and human diets. For each scenario, we determine whether the supply of crop products meets the demand and whether t...

The deforestation and degradation of tropical forests are taking place at an extremely rapid pace. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the estimated annual rate of tropical deforestation during the 1981-1985 period was 113 846 square kilometers or 0.6% of the 1981 total forested area. The implications of the loss of these forests are staggering (Myers, N., 1989. Deforestat...