Aspergillus niger F7 isolated from soil was found to be the potent producer of cellulase and xylanase. The residue of forest species Toona ciliata, Celtris australis, Cedrus deodara and Pinus roxburghii was selected as substrate for biodegradation study due to its easy availability and wide use in industry. It was subjected to alkali (sodium hydroxide) treatment for enhancing its degradation. B...

Land degradation is a global concern. In tropical areas it primarily concerns the conversion of forest into non-forest lands and the associated losses of environmental services. Defining such degradation is not straightforward hampering effective reduction in degradation and use of already degraded lands for more productive purposes. To facilitate the processes of avoided degradation and land r...

Tanzania 2002 Summary The continued vicious cycle of population-poverty-and-environmental degradation has been acknowledged. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to draw attention to the serious consequences of land degradation, a national and trans-national socioeconomic complex problem, and the need for rehabilitating degraded lands in the sub-humid lands of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The ...

Forested tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia are being rapidly converted to agriculture or degraded into non-forest vegetation. Although large areas have been abandoned, there is little evidence for subsequent forest recovery. As part of a study of forest degradation and recovery, we used seed removal experiments and rodent surveys to investigate the potential role of post-dispersal seed preda...

Freshwaters provide valuable habitat and important ecosystem services but are threatened worldwide by habitat loss and degradation. In Southeast Asia, rainforest streams are particularly threatened by logging and conversion to oil palm, but we lack information on the impacts of this on freshwater environmental conditions, and the relative importance of catchment versus riparian-scale disturbanc...

Unasylva 230, Vol. 59, 2008 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report (IPCC, 2007) estimated that the forest sector contributes 17.4 percent of all greenhouse gases from anthropogenic sources; most of this is due to deforestation and forest degradation. The Stern Review on the economics of climate change (Stern, 2007), furthermore, observed that “curbing deforesta...

Human population pressures upon land resources have increased the need to assess impacts of land use change on soil quality. In order to assess effects of land use changes on soil quality properties in a tropical forest ecosystem of Bangladesh, soil samples were collected from adjacent well-stocked Shorea robusta natural forest, land reforested with Acacia, grassland and cultivated land. Land u...

In this paper, grid cell based spatial statistics were used to quantify the drivers of land-cover and land-use change (LCLUC) and habitat degradation in a tropical rainforest in Madagascar. First, a spectral database of various land-cover and land-use information was compiled using multi-year field campaign data and photointerpretation of satellite images. Next, residential areas were extracted...

Photochemical and microbial degradation of external inputs of dissolved organic matter (DOM) from both natural (forests) and anthropogenic (swine and equine pastures) non-point sources to rivers were examined through field and laboratory microcosm experiments. Little or no photochemical degradation of DOM to inorganic N or P occurred in either the agricultural or forest runoff. The dissolved or...