Forest fragmentation threatens the sustainability of forest communities in the eastern United States. Forest communities exhibiting either a low total area or low percentage of intact forest are subject to relatively higher risk of shifts in stand composition towards edge-adapted and invasive species. Such changes in stand composition could result in local extirpation of communities, homogeniza...

The economic and ecological damages caused by wildfires are alarming. Because such damages are expected to increase with changes in wildfire regimes, this calls for more effective wildfire mitigation and adaptation strategies. Wildfire adaptation options for forestland owners include purchasing wildfire insurance, which provides compensation to those insured if a wildfire damages their properti...

December 2004 • Journal of Forestry Historically, many issues in US forest policy have involved heated exchanges between timber interests and environmental groups over the future of the nation’s national forests. Debate about whether national forests should produce timber and rural economic opportunities, or pursue other objectives such as ecological restoration and recreation, generally ignore...

The paper explores rationales of the rise and expansion of small scale non-industrial private forestry. The historical aspects of the small scale of forests are also briefly reviewed. In particular, the paper seeks to explain the reason for the increasing number of nonindustrial private forest ownerships with smaller holding size or private forestland parcelization. The main arguments are that ...

Forests are one of the most important components of the global biosphere and have critical influences on the Earth’s ecological balance. Regularly updated forest cover information is necessary for various forest management applications as well as climate modeling studies. However, map products are not widely updated at continental or national scales because the current land cover products have ...

Since the late 1990s, China has been implementing one of the largest ecological restoration initiatives in not only the country but also the world—the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP). An overarching question is how severe the regional deforestation had become before the NFPP was initiated and whether the forest condition in the protected area has significantly improved afterwards. The ...

Quantifying and reporting the extent of forest resources is one of the primary objectives of forest resource assessments across geopolitical scales (e.g. local, regional, national and international). While there has been a substantial increase in the amount of environmental data, estimates for national and international assessments are often compiled from surveys conducted at fi ner geopolitica...