Tropical forests (and all other forests) have suffered enormous damage in recent decades. If the current rate of forest clearance in the tropics (estimated to be 150 000–250 000 km per year) continues, they will disappear as a major, large-scale ecosystem in many countries during the 21st century. As a result, a chain of environmental problems, including increased soil erosion, damage to water ...

We studied the distribution of sandflies (Diptera: Phlebotominae)--insect vectors of several diseases, including leishmaniasis--at the interface between primary forest and cattle pasture and between primary forest and secondary forest (< 15 yr old) in Southern Brazilian Amazonia. Sandflies were collected by using a combination of light traps and traps having vertebrates as baits. Strong differe...

Recent observations of widespread changes in mature tropical forests such as increasing tree growth, recruitment and mortality rates and increasing above-ground biomass suggest that 'global change' agents may be causing predictable changes in tropical forests. However, consensus over both the robustness of these changes and the environmental drivers that may be causing them is yet to emerge. Th...

Native forests are shrinking worldwide, causing a loss of biological diversity. Our ability to prioritize forest conservation actions is hampered by a lack of information about the relative impacts of different types of forest loss on biodiversity. In particular, we lack rigorous comparisons of the effects of clearing forests for tree plantations and for human settlements, two leading causes of...

In Random Forests [2] several trees are constructed from bootstrapor subsamples of the original data. Random Forests have become very popular, e.g., in the fields of genetics and bioinformatics, because they can deal with high-dimensional problems including complex interaction effects. Conditional Inference Forests [8] provide an implementation of Random Forests with unbiased variable selection...

Tropical forests store large amounts of biomass despite they generally grow in nutrient-poor soils, suggesting that the role of soil characteristics in the structure and dynamics of tropical forests is complex. We used data for >34 000 trees from several permanent plots in French Guiana to investigate if soil characteristics could predict the structure (tree diameter, density and aboveground bi...

Given the growing US population and its relatively stable supply of publicly owned forests, it seems likely that future demand for outdoor recreation will be increasingly satisfied by privately owned forests. Therefore, it becomes important to understand whether visitors to publicly and privately owned forests have different characteristics. Using data from a US household survey, we found that ...

Species composition, distribution patterns and endemism are outlined for the dung beetles in the ecoregions of the western slopes of the moist South Western Ghats, South India. Among the 142 dung beetle species known, 35 are endemic to the Western Ghats; 29 are endemic to the moist South Western Ghats; 25 are regionally endemic to the South Western Ghats montane rain forests ecoregion; and one ...

Increasing urbanisation and industrialisation have led to a dramatic reduction in forest area, and now only culturally protected remnants of natural forests and some new plantations remain in most areas of the north of Iran. To investigate the status of the chemical and physical characteristics of soil under these remnant forests and assess the possible impacts of reforestation on soil properti...