Deforestation causes habitat loss, fragmentation, degradation, and can ultimately cause extinction of the remnant species. Tropical montane birds face these threats with the added natural vulnerability of narrower elevational ranges and higher specialization than lowland species. Recent studies assess the impact of present and future global climate change on species' ranges, but only a few of t...

Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970's, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral la...

Tropical deforestation has caused a significant share of carbon emissions and species losses, but historical patterns have rarely been explicitly considered when estimating these impacts [1]. A deforestation event today leads to a time-delayed future release of carbon, from the eventual decay either of forest products or of slash left at the site [2]. Similarly, deforestation often does not res...

Unasylva 230, Vol. 59, 2008 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report (IPCC, 2007) estimated that the forest sector contributes 17.4 percent of all greenhouse gases from anthropogenic sources; most of this is due to deforestation and forest degradation. The Stern Review on the economics of climate change (Stern, 2007), furthermore, observed that “curbing deforesta...

To clarify mechanisms linking deforestation, anopheline ecology, and malaria epidemiology, this study draws together 60 examples of changes in anopheline ecology and malaria incidence as a consequence of deforestation and agricultural development. The deforestation projects were classified based on subsequent land use and were reviewed in terms of their impact on anopheline density and malaria ...

This study analyzes the optimal allocation of the world’s land resources over the course of the next century within a dynamic forwardlooking framework, which brings together distinct strands of economic, agronomic, and biophysical literature and incorporates key drivers affecting global land-use. We show that, while some deforestation is optimal in the near term, the desirability of further def...

This study uses Landsat satellite data to document the rates and patterns of land-cover change along a portion of the Colombia-Ecuador border during a 23-yr period (1973-1996). Human colonization has resulted in extensive deforestation in both countries. Satellite change detection analysis showed that the annual rates of deforestation were considerably higher for the Colombian side of the borde...

This study reports the first assessment of the compounding effects of land-use change and greenhouse gas warming effects on our understanding of projections of future climate. An AGCM simulation of the potential impacts of tropical deforestation and greenhouse warming on climate, employing a version of NCAR Community Climate Model (CCM1-Oz), is presented. The joint impacts of tropical deforesta...

Despite accounting for 17–25% of anthropogenic emissions, deforestation was not included in the Kyoto Protocol. The UN Convention on Climate Change is considering its inclusion in future agreements and asked its scientific board to study methodological and scientific issues related to positive incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation. Here we present an empirically derived mechanism th...