Sacred forests represent an important long-held tradition of conserving specific land areas that have cultural, and often religious, significance. India, with its diversity of cultures and traditions, has over 100 000 sacred forests. Many of these groves are forest fragments in agricultural landscapes. In most cases, community members are at least aware of these fragments, if not actively invol...

The high diversity of epiphytes typical of undisturbed montane tropical forests has been negatively affected by continuous deforestation and forest conversion to secondary vegetation. Macrolichens are an important component of these epiphytes. Because their physiology is strongly coupled to humidity and solar radiation, we hypothesized that microclimatic changes derived from forest clearing and...

Low stature tropical forests, such as found on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, are globally a threatened ecosystem, largely due to human habitation and development of agricultural activities. The virtual abandonment of sisal production surrounding Mérida has facilitated the regeneration of large areas of secondary forest. These forests provide multiple services, including carbon sequestration an...

This paper examines how a new highway in Belize will change a tropical forest landscape. Since the end of British colonialism (1981), the Maya communities in Belize’s Toledo District have struggled with the state for control of the lands they have customarily used to produce a livelihood. We were approached by some Maya leaders, who recognize that the paving of a new highway through their villa...

SUMMARY A small remnant of native forest and scrub located in the upper East Branch of the Tokomairiro River is described and assessed for ecological significance. Vegetation grades from pasture on rolling ridges through bracken, Himalayan honeysuckle, gorse and broom scrub on upper gully slopes, to a mosaic of forest types characterised by kanuka, common broadleaved species, or narrow-leaved l...

Policies must balance forest conservation’s local costs with its benefits—local to global—in terms of biodiversity, the mitigation of climate change, and other eco-services such as water quality. The trade-offs with development vary across forest locations. We argue that considering location in three ways helps to predict policy impact and improve policy choice: (i) policy impacts vary by locat...

A growing literature has identified agricultural expansion by small farmers in the tropics as an important cause of global forest clearing, yet institutional factors affecting small farmers' decisions have rarely been taken into account in empirical analyses. We examine the influence of context on household land use/cover change (LUCC) decisions and estimate a multilevel model of LUCC for fores...

Variants of the Budkyo hydrological model describe the effects of land use change on annual water yield. A recent modification using a simple process-based ecohydrological model provides insight into the partitioning of rainfall between runoff and evapotranspiration. In particular, the ‘effective vegetation rooting depth’ becomes the single free parameter in the model and can be related to land...

The objective of this study is to better understand the complexity of deforestation processes in southern Cameroon by testing a multivariate, spatial model of land-cover change trajectories associated with deforestation. The spatial model integrates a spectrum of independent variables that characterize land rent on a spatially explicit basis. The use of a time series of high-spatialresolution r...

Studies about the impact of the timber trade on tropical forests have often oversimplified process complexity and underestimated regional variability. This study shows that forest degradation and clearing in Northwest Ecuador between 1983 and 1992 was closely linked to commercial logging. A key finding is that domestic demand is critical for shaping timber extraction and, hence, forest degradat...