Decentralization of forest management in India has taken a leap forward with declaration of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights on Forest) Act (also known as FRA), 2006. After more than a century of centralization, the Forest Policy of 1988 was the first step towards decentralized management. The Act is presented as an effort to set right the injust...

Male orchid bees were collected by chemical baiting in four forest fragments in parks of the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil. One thousand three hundred and twenty-five males belonging to 14 species were captured within one year. The capture data were compared through correlation tests. The data suggest that abundance of orchid bees tend to increase with fragment size,...

a r t i c l e i n f o Rigorous assessments of the economic impacts of introduced species at broad spatial scales are required to provide credible information to policy makers. We propose that economic models of aggregate damages induced by biological invasions need to link microeconomic analyses of site-specific economic damages with spatial-dynamic models of value change associated with invasi...

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Redwood Sciences Laboratory, 1700 Bayview Dr., Arcata, CA 95521, USA (WJZ, RLT, FVS) United State Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Six Rivers National Forest, 1330 Bayshore Way, Eureka, CA 95501-3438, USA (GAS, KNS) Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of Cali...

To ensure remote sensing MODIS hotspot (also known as active fire products or hotspots) quality and precision in forest fire control and management in Thailand, an increased level of confidence is needed. Accuracy assessment of MODIS hotspots utilizing field survey data validation is described. A quantitative evaluation of MODIS hotspot products has been carried out since the 2007 forest fire s...

Biodiversity is under increasing pressure worldwide from increasing human population, global economic and social changes, and climate change. These pressures result from the interaction between the expanding influence of humanity and ecological processes that alter the delivery of ecosystem goods and services (Dudley and Stolton 2012). Most of the world’s national parks conserve places of high ...

In spite of their economic importance, coral reef communities of the world are rapidly decreasing, and an adequate management planification is needed. The benthic and fish communities of Dos Mosquises Sur and Madrizqui at Los Roques National Park, and Caiman and Cayo Norte at Morrocoy National Park, in Venezuela were monitored during 2003 and 2004. The CARICOMP method was used to describe the b...

The economic vitality of many communities has declined as a result of changes in their economic structures. In some places, economic growth is being fostered by the inmigration of retirees. This exploratory study investigated the importance of public recreation services and parks in retirees’ choice of community, using a random sample of retired persons who had moved to South Carolina in the pa...

Natural and anthropogenic disturbances alter canopy structure, understory vegetation, amount of woody debris, and the litter and soil layers in forest ecosystems. These environmental changes impact forest communities, including ground-dwelling invertebrates that are key regulators of ecosystem processes. Variation in frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial scale of disturbances affect the m...

Climate change will affect not only natural and cultural resources within protected areas but also tourism and visitation patterns. The U.S. National Park Service systematically collects data regarding its 270+ million annual recreation visits, and therefore provides an opportunity to examine how human visitation may respond to climate change from the tropics to the polar regions. To assess the...