The zoonotic malaria species Plasmodium knowlesi has become the main cause of human malaria in Malaysian Borneo. Deforestation and associated environmental and population changes have been hypothesized as main drivers of this apparent emergence. We gathered village-level data for P. knowlesi incidence for the districts of Kudat and Kota Marudu in Sabah state, Malaysia, for 2008-2012. We adjuste...

Consistent long-term estimates of fire emissions are important to understand the changing role of fire in the global carbon cycle and to assess the relative importance of humans and climate in shaping fire regimes. However, there is limited information on fire emissions from before the satellite era. We show that in the Amazon region, including the Arc of Deforestation and Bolivia, visibility o...

This paper shows how the Improvement Theorem|a semantic condition for the total correctness of program transformation on higher-order functional programs|has practical value in proving the correctness of automatic techniques, including deforestation and supercompilation. This is aided by a novel formulation (and generalisation) of deforestation-like transformations, which also greatly adds to t...

A coupled numerical model of the global atmosphere and biosphere has been used to assess the effects of Amazon deforestation on the regional and global climate. When the tropical forests in the model were replaced by degraded grass (pasture), there was a significant increase in surface temperature and a decrease in evapotranspiration and precipitation over Amazonia. In the simulation, the lengt...

This thesis investigates the question how emissions from land-use displacement can be assessed and accounted for, using the example of carbon-leakage accounting in the planned UNFCCC mechanism on ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD). REDD serves here as example of an international forest conservation policy that might be effective locally but could lead to displ...

Public land grabbing, concomitant with hinterland colonization and agrarian reform programs, translocated millions of rural migrants into remote regions Brazil, most recently to the Amazonian forest domain. Despite state-of-the-art command-and-control sensing monitoring systems in effective law enforcement a country ∼8.5 million km 2 remains huge challenge, particularly difficult times lenient ...

The Zagros forests (west of Iran) have been highly exploited in recent decades by human impacts. Easy access, abundance and variety of valuable forest yields have led to population growth density, creation of new residential areas and deforestation activities. In order to determinate the distribution and rate of deforestation from 1995 to 2006 by using the satellite imagery (IRS-1C and  LANDSAT...