National income accounting has been criticized because of its failure to encompass the notion of sustainability. Several studies address this problem through ‘green’ income accounting — i.e. by adjusting conventionally measured GDP for reduction in a given country’s ‘stock’ of natural resources. These studies generally base value on the unit net price of the resource. Other studies go beyond ne...

Deforestation does not progress randomly throughout landscapes (Viana et al., 1997; Ezard & Travis, 2006; Silva et al., 2007) because of the non-random spatial distribution of land suitable for specific human activities and laws that often protect particular habitats or vegetation types. Riparian vegetation, for example, is protected by law in many countries (Gregory et al., 1991). Thus, if enf...

The degree at which tropical forests are exposed to human pressure is spatially dependent. Population density, proximity to roads, terrain slope, logging activities and land distribution projects are well known factors inducing deforestation and forest degradation in Latin America. Using expert knowledge to weight these threat factors and a Geographical Information System for spatial modeling, ...

Ecological gradients have long been recognized as important regions for diversification and speciation. However, little attention has been paid to the evolutionary consequences or conservation implications of human activities that fundamentally change the environmental features of such gradients. Here we show that recent deforestation in West Africa has homogenized the rainforest-savanna gradie...

Mitigating the negative impacts of declining worldwide forest cover remains a significant socio-ecological challenge, due to the dominant role of human decision-making. Here we use a Markov chain model of land-use dynamics to examine the impact of governance on forest cover in a region. Each land parcel can be either forested or barren (deforested), and landowners decide whether to deforest the...

Globally, deforestation continues, and although protected areas effectively protect forests, the majority of forests are not in protected areas. Thus, how effective are different management regimes to avoid deforestation in non-protected forests? We sought to assess the effectiveness of different national forest-management regimes to safeguard forests outside protected areas. We compared 2000-2...

The emergence of infectious diseases is reviewed highlighting the potential role played by main environmental anthropogenic disturbances as, deforestation, land-use change, human-induced climate biodiversity loss and illegal wildlife trade. Ultimately, it plausible that human impact on biosphere could be root cause these emerging diseases, economic globalization, population growth landscape ant...

Although deforestation affects hydrological and climatic variables over tropical regions, its actual contributions to changes in evapotranspiration (ET) over subarctic China remain unknown. To establish a quantitative relationship between deforestation and terrestrial ET variations, we estimated ET using a semi-empirical Penman (SEMI-PM) algorithm driven by meteorological and satellite data at ...