Migration necessarily precedes environmental change in the form of deforestation and soil degradation in tropical agricultural frontiers. But what environmental factors may contribute to these migration streams in the first place? Identifying environmental characteristics related to this process is crucial for understanding how environmental change and migration may form recurrent feedback loop...

Tropical Secondary Forests (SFs) are vulnerable forest systems growing in areas that have been subject to unsustainable human activities leading deforestation. SFs account for swathes of tropical landscapes lost their capacity provide a high level goods and services. They also located highly dynamic human-pressured natural human-induced catastrophic events, such as hurricanes or fires. Without ...

The present study was conducted to assess socio-economic impacts of deforestation of Hyrcanian forests in two basins of Do-Hezar and Se-Hezar, northern Iran. To this end, changes in the forest area were detected over the period between 1990 and 2006 based on land use land cover maps derived from Landsat and IRS satellite images. The land use changes were investigated by enhancement of the image...

Recent drought events underscore the vulnerability of Amazon forests to understorey fires. The long-term impact of fires on biodiversity and forest carbon stocks depends on the frequency of fire damages and deforestation rates of burned forests. Here, we characterized the spatial and temporal dynamics of understorey fires (1999-2010) and deforestation (2001-2010) in southern Amazonia using new ...

Measuring the aerial extent of tropical deforestation for other than localized areas requires the use of satellite data.We present evidence to show that an accurate determination of tropical deforestation is very di cult to achieve by a ‘random sampling’ analysis of Landsat or similar high spatial resolution data unless a very high percentage of the area to be studied is sampled. In order to a...

A n alarming annual average deforestation rate of 22,500 km2 in the Brazilian Amazon (1) from 2000 to 2005 has focused international attention on Brazil because of the destruction of this high-biodiversity biome (2) and its globally significant contribution to carbon emissions (3). Deforestation has already converted 680,000 km2 of pristine forests to other land covers, accounting for 75% of Br...

■ Abstract Although human-induced changes to the global environment and natural biotic resources, collectively labeled “global change” and the “biodiversity crisis,” have accelerated with industrialization over the past 300 years, such changes have a much longer history. Particularly since the rise of agriculturally based societies and associated population expansion during the early Holocene, ...

Long-term paleofire perspectives provide key information on natural and human-derived land cover changes. The last few millennia are crucial to understanding the future of wildfire threats, since increasing global temperatures expected have an impact regions previously assumed not be endangered. In this study we investigate interplay between changing climatic conditions, transformation, fires, ...