1 This is one of three background papers commissioned by the United Nations Forum for Forests. Background paper 1: Focuses on economic contributions of forests, by Agrawal, Shepherd and Cashore; Background Paper 2: Forests and cross-sectorial linkages, by Lele, Karsenty, Benson, Fétiveau, Agarwal and Goswami; and Background paper 3: The role of forests in a future world, by Agrawal et al. This ...

Timber volume is an important parameter in forestry and with the position of each individual tree together with its size this parameter can be estimated with higher accuracy than from estimations made at stand level. In this paper, three existing methods for individual tree crown extraction are compared for different types of forests. The types of forests range from planted forests to dense for...

Amazon forests experienced two severe droughts at the beginning of the 21st century: one in 2005 and the other in 2010. How Amazon forests responded to these droughts is critical for the future of the Earth’s climate system. It is only possible to assess Amazon forests’ response to the droughts in large areal extent through satellite remote sensing. Here, we used the Multi-Angle Implementation ...

Ensembles of randomized decision trees, usually referred to as random forests, are widely used for classification and regression tasks in machine learning and statistics. Random forests achieve competitive predictive performance and are computationally efficient to train and test, making them excellent candidates for real-world prediction tasks. The most popular random forest variants (such as ...

People and forests are interdependent. People depend on forests for their livelihoods because the forest provides a wide range of goods and services. Locally and globally, trees ameliorate climate, protect soil, regulate water, and maintain biological diversity on which future benefits depend. Likewise, the existence and maintenance of forests depend on people, particularly those people who liv...

Tropical and subtropical dry forest life zones support forests with lower stature and species richness than do tropical and subtropical life zones with greater water availability. The number of naturalized species that can thrive and mix with native species to form novel forests in dry forest conditions in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands is lower than in other insular life zones. These no...

BACKGROUND EuroAmerican land-use and its legacies have transformed forest structure and composition across the United States (US). More accurate reconstructions of historical states are critical to understanding the processes governing past, current, and future forest dynamics. Here we present new gridded (8x8km) reconstructions of pre-settlement (1800s) forest composition and structure from th...

What makes virgin forests better forests? Biodiversity evaluation depends on the value systems of the stakeholders involved. Indicators for conservation value, ecosystem functions, wilderness, uniqueness, or species richness may not correlate, or even correlate negatively. Based on arthropod data from a comparative study in two types of virgin forests in core areas of the Carpathian Biosphere R...

India’s forests have played an integral role in sustaining its people over many millennia. In addition to an abundance of nutritional, medicinal and subsistence goods, wilderness areas have provided the environment for spiritual and cultural expression of the Indian people. In the pre-British period, the ownership of forests was with the Kings, but the forest regimes were aimed at fair distribu...

BACKGROUND In the lower Mekong Basin and coastal zones of Southern Vietnam, forests dominated by the genus Melaleuca have two notable features: most have been substantially disturbed by human activity and can now be considered as degraded forests; and most are subject to acute pressures from climate change, particularly in regards to changes in the hydrological and sodicity properties of forest...