Protected areas in tropical countries are managed under different governance regimes, the relative effectiveness of which in avoiding deforestation has been the subject of recent debates. Participants in these debates answer appeals for more strict protection with the argument that sustainable use areas and indigenous lands can balance deforestation pressures by leveraging local support to crea...

Deforestation is associated with increased atmospheric CO2 and alterations to the surface energy and mass balances that can lead to local and global climate changes. Previous modelling studies show that the global surface air temperature (SAT) response to deforestation depends on latitude, with most simulations showing that high latitude deforestation results in cooling, low latitude deforestat...

Efforts to reduce deforestation to mitigate climate change and to conserve biodiversity are taking place on a global scale. While many studies have estimated the emissions occurring from deforestation, few studies have quantified the domestic and international drivers sustaining deforestation rates. In this study we establish the link between Brazilian deforestation and production of cattle and...

The Amazon is one of the most diverse biomes around globe, currently threatened by economic and industrial development climate change. Large mammals are keystone species, playing an important role in ecosystem structure function as ecological engineers, while being highly susceptible to deforestation, habitat degradation, human exploitation. Using a unifying hierarchical Bayesian spatial approa...

The Ipswich watershed in northeastern Massachusetts, USA, is experiencing important land-use changes, which are contributing to severe environmental problems such as eutrophication, ground water depletion and loss of wildlife. The objective of this paper is to model deforestation between 1971, 1985 and 1991 in the watershed of the Ipswich River in Massachusetts, USA, where most of the forest lo...

Remote sensing technologies are increasingly used to monitor landscape change in many parts of the world. While the availability of extensive and timely imagery from various satellite sensors can aid in identifying the rates and patterns of deforestation, modelling techniques can evaluate the socioeconomic and biophysical forces driving deforestation processes. This paper briefly reviews some e...

provide essential ecosystem services on which many poor people depend. Tropical forests contain the majority of the world's rapidly vanishing indigenous cultures and its peoples living in voluntary isolation [5]. REDD could also slow the loss of biodiversity — important in itself and in its central contribution to ecosystem services [6]. Over half of all species live in tropical forests and are...

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is considered one of the most cost-effective strategies for mitigating climate change. However, historical deforestation and emission rates-critical inputs for setting reference emission levels for REDD+-are poorly understood. Here we use multi-source, time-series satellite data to quantify carbon emissions from deforestation ...

From 2006 to 2010, deforestation in the Amazon frontier state of Mato Grosso decreased to 30% of its historical average (1996-2005) whereas agricultural production reached an all-time high. This study combines satellite data with government deforestation and production statistics to assess land-use transitions and potential market and policy drivers associated with these trends. In the forested...