Tropical forests play a crucial role in regulating regional and global climate dynamics, and model projections suggest that rapid climate change may result in forest dieback or savannization. However, these predictions are largely based on results from leaf-level studies. How tropical forests respond and feedback to climate change is largely unknown at the ecosystem level. Several complementary...

Forests play an important role in environmental protection. There is a long history of protection forests in mountain areas, where they help to prevent soil erosion, landslides and avalanches, and where they are important in maintaining the water quality of rivers draining forested catchments. Special silvicultural methods are required to ensure that these forests are maintained indefinitely. F...

Aim There is increasing concern regarding sustainable management and restoration of planted forests, particuIarly in the Mediterranean Basin where pine species have been widely used. The aim of this study was to analyse the environmental and structural characteristics of Mediterranean planted pine forests in relation to natural pine forests. Specifically, we assessed recruitment and woody speci...

Many forest herbs show reduced frequency in forests growing on former agricultural land (secondary forests) relative to forests that were never cleared for agriculture (primary forests). To explain this pattern, studies of secondary forest colonization by forest herbs have stressed the role of limited seed dispersal, though environmental conditions may also limit colonization. Here I demonstrat...

Examining the fine-scale spatial structure of fungal populations can tell us much about how individual species reproduce and disperse throughout natural landscapes. Here we study the fine-scale genetic structure of Tricholoma matsutake, a prized edible and medicinal mushroom, by systematic sampling of mycorrhizas within fairy rings in 50-y-old and old-growth forests in two villages. Using singl...

From analysis of published global site biomass data (n = 136) from primary forests, we discovered (i) the world's highest known total biomass carbon density (living plus dead) of 1,867 tonnes carbon per ha (average value from 13 sites) occurs in Australian temperate moist Eucalyptus regnans forests, and (ii) average values of the global site biomass data were higher for sampled temperate moist ...

Elevated nitrogen (N) deposition to tropical forests may accelerate ecosystem phosphorus (P) limitation. This study examined responses of fine root biomass, nutrient concentrations, and acid phosphatase activity (APA) of bulk soil to five years of N and P additions in one old-growth and two younger lowland tropical forests in southern China. The old-growth forest had higher N capital than the t...

An example of the possible use of selected forest-stand based indicators for evaluation of conservation status was shown in case of the Natura 2000 forest habitats of Slovenia, and the potential threats to habitat types were identified. Using the existing forest-management system, and two levels of ICP Forests monitoring as sources of data on the size of habitat, tree composition, developmental...

Random forests are one type of the most effective ensemble learning methods. In spite of their sound empirical performance, the study on their theoretical properties has been left far behind. Recently, several random forests variants with nice theoretical basis have been proposed, but they all suffer from poor empirical performance. In this paper, we propose a Bernoulli random forests model (BR...

Elevated nitrogen (N) deposition may constrain soil phosphorus (P) and base cation availability in tropical forests, for which limited evidence have yet been available. In this study, we reported responses of soil inorganic nutrients to full factorial N and P treatments in three tropical forests different in initial soil N status (N-saturated old-growth forest and two less-N-rich younger forest...