BACKGROUND Carbon stocks and fluxes in tropical forests remain large sources of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Airborne lidar remote sensing is a powerful tool for estimating aboveground biomass, provided that lidar measurements penetrate dense forest vegetation to generate accurate estimates of surface topography and canopy heights. Tropical forest areas with complex topography prese...

Elevated deer densities have led to reports of forest regeneration failure and ecological damage. However, there is growing evidence that the biophysical conditions of a forest thatmake it attractive to deermay be a contributing factor in determining browsing levels. Thus, an understanding of settling stimulus—how attractive an area is to deer in terms of food-independent habitat requirements— ...

Forest landscape models are effective tools for exploring the effects of long-term and large-scale landscape processes such as seed dispersal, fire, and timber harvest. These models have been widely used for about a decade, and although significant advances in theory and technology have been incorporated into their development, evaluating the veracity of simulated results from forest landscape ...

Conservation of forests outside protected areas is essential for maintaining forest connectivity, which largely depends on the effectiveness of local institutions. In this study, we use Landsat data to explore the relationship between vegetation structure and forest management institutions, in order to assess the efficacy of local institutions in management of forests outside protected areas. T...

A central parameter of the terrestrial carbon budget is forest biomass which represents a proxy for the stored carbon. Despite its crucial role in the terrestrial carbon budget, forest biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the planet due to the great difficulties in measuring biomass on the ground and consistently aggregating measurements across scales. Today’s information is largel...

Africa's Albertine Rift region faces a juxtaposition of rapid human population growth and protected areas, making it one of the world's most vulnerable biodiversity hotspots. Using satellite-derived estimates of forest cover change, we examined national socioeconomic, demographic, agricultural production, and local demographic and geographic variables, to assess multilevel forces driving local ...

In the low density intergalactic medium (IGM) that gives rise to the Lyman-α forest, gas temperature and density are tightly correlated. The velocity scale of thermal broadening and the Hubble flow across the gas Jeans scale are of similar magnitude (HλJ ∼ σth). To separate the effects of gas pressure support and thermal broadening on the Lyα forest, we compare spectra extracted from two smooth...

We develop an analytical method based on the lognormal approximation to compute the column density distribution of the Lyman-alpha forest in the low column density limit. We compute the column density distributions for six different cosmological models and found that the standard, COBE -normalized CDM model cannot fit the observations of the Lyman-alpha forest at z = 3. The amplitude of the flu...

Coarse woody debris (CWD) is an essential component in defining the structure and function of forest ecosystems. Long-term dynamics of CWD characteristics not only affect the release rates of chemical elements from CWD, but also the species diversity of inhabiting plants, animals, insects, and microorganisms as well as the overall health of ecosystems. However, few quantitative studies have bee...

The effect of honeydew density on arthropod community structure was investigated in the Nothofagus forest of Nelson Lakes National Park, New Zealand. Pitfall trapping revealed no community response to honeydew density, whereas sticky trapping showed the community composition of trunk-dwelling arthropods varied along a honeydew gradient. Mycetophilidae, Staphylinidae, Pteromalidae and Margarodid...