Although forest ecosystems are fundamental sources of services and global biodiversity, their capacity to maintain these benefits in the future is potentially threatened by anthropogenic impacts such as climate change, land use, and unsustainable management practices. Thus far, studies focusing on forests and their services have gained less attention compared with studies on other biomes. Addit...

Sustainable forest management is defined as “the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfil, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions [...].” (MCPFE, 1994). As such, forest management has to satisfy multiple and often confl...

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...

BACKGROUND Forests occur across diverse biomes, each of which shows a specific composition of plant communities associated with the particular climate regimes. Predicted future climate change will have impacts on the vulnerability and productivity of forests; in some regions higher temperatures will extend the growing season and thus improve forest productivity, while changed annual precipitati...

Human land use may detrimentally affect biodiversity, yet long-term stability of species communities is vital for maintaining ecosystem functioning. Community stability can be achieved by higher species diversity (portfolio effect), higher asynchrony across species (insurance hypothesis) and higher abundance of populations. However, the relative importance of these stabilizing pathways and whet...

Landowner education is the foundation of a broad suite of public investments designed to encourage sustainable forest management. Extension Forestry programs are the primary providers of landowner education in the United States. We report the results of a census of the 50 state-level Extension Forestry Program Leaders on status, trends, and innovations in their programs. These programs employ 2...

this study was performed in order to consider the effect of management plans on forest, through comparison between qualitative and quantitative characteristics of managed and unmanaged forests. compartment no. 149 from shourab district (52.8 ha) and compartment no. 218 from jamand district (68.7 ha) were selected as managed and unmanaged forests, respectively and were inventoried using a system...

Collective action by local communities has increasingly been recognised as crucial for effective management of natural resources, particularly the management of forests in the rural settings. This recognition is principally based on the universal and often unquestioned assumption that the involvement of local communities in the management of forests can improve the forest condition and utilisat...

One of the main objectives of the 1994 Cameroonian forestry law is to improve the management of production forests by including minimum safeguards for sustainability into compulsory forest management plans. As of 2007, about 3.5 million hectares (60%) of the productive forests are harvested following the prescriptions of 49 approved management plans. The development and implementation of these ...