xi Acknowledgments xiii Acronyms and Abbreviations xv Executive Summary xvii 1. Motivation for the Study 1 2. Deforestation and Land Use in Amazonia: Evidence of Large Scale Cattle Ranching 5 Temporal Trend of Deforestation 5 Spatial Patterns at the Municipal Level 6 Evolution of Land Use in Legal Amazonia 9 Contribution of Large and Small Deforested Areas to Overall Deforestation 10 Evolution ...

This study identifies drivers of deforestation in Mexico by applying Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models to cartographic and statistical data. A wall-to-wall multitemporal GIS database was constructed incorporating digital land use/land cover maps for 2002 and 2007; along with ancillary data (road network, settlements, topography and socioeconomical parameters). The database analysi...

We studied a two-person game regarding deforestation in human-environment relationships. Each landowner manages a single land parcel where the state of land-use is forested, agricultural, or abandoned. The landowner has two strategies available: forest conservation and deforestation. The choice of deforestation provides a high return to the landowner, but it degrades the forest ecosystem servic...

Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than ‘‘paper parks’’ that are chronically short of the financial, human, and technical resources needed for effective management. It is not clear whether and how severely under-resourced parks affect deforestation. In principle, they could either stem it by,...

The remaining carbon stocks in wet tropical forests are currently at risk because of anthropogenic deforestation, but also because of the possibility of release driven by climate change. To identify the relative roles of CO2 increase, changing temperature and rainfall, and deforestation in the future, and the magnitude of their impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we have applied a dynamic...

Deforestation remains one of the largest sources of global CO2 emissions, constituting around 17% of total emissions (Figure 1; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007a). When forests are converted to agriculture, most of the carbon in biomass is emitted into the atmosphere either through active burning, or through decay. Deforestation is rather common today in tropical regions (Brazil,...

In functional languages intermediate data structures are often used as glue to connect separate parts of a program together. Deforestation is the process of automatically removing intermediate data structures. In this thesis we present and analyse a new approach to deforestation. This new approach is both practical and general. We analyse in detail the problem of list removal rather than the mo...

Aragão and Shimabukuro (Reports, 4 June 2010, p. 1275) reported that fires increase in agricultural frontiers even as deforestation decreases and concluded that these fires lead to unaccounted carbon emissions under the United Nations climate treaty's tropical deforestation and forest degradation component. Emissions from post-deforestation management activities are, in fact, included in these ...

Great ape populations are undergoing a dramatic decline, which is predicted to result in their extinction in the wild from entire regions in the near future. Recent findings have particularly focused on African apes, and have implicated multiple factors contributing to this decline, such as deforestation, hunting, and disease. Less well-publicised, but equally dramatic, has been the decline in ...