Roads are widely said to be one of the most important predictors of frontier expansion and deforestation in tropical forest regions, across a range of land dynamics . Though they are widely studied, careful documentation of the magnitude of roads’ impacts is in fact relatively scarce. Not infrequently, a simple aerial or satellite snapshot is said to ‘document’ the impacts of reduced transport ...

Deforestation still nowadays occurs at an alarming rate in tropical regions. Forest monitoring is required to delineate the extents of deforested areas based on high resolution satellite images (SPOT). But classical change detection techniques have failed to detect small clearing spread over the landscape as occurring in African forests. Developed initially for temperate forests, the automated ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Landsat time series stacks (LTSS) Vegetation change tracker (VCT) Forest z-score (FZ) Integrated forest z-score (IFZ) A highly automated algorithm called vegetation change tracker (VCT) has been developed for reconstructing recent forest disturbance history using Landsat time series stacks (LTSS). This algorithm is based on the spectral–temporal properties of lan...

Tick-borne rickettsioses are often acquired in rural settings within the endemic areas; however, urban transmission also occurs. Conversely, epidemic typhus, murine typhus, and rickettsialpox characteristically are acquired in urban and suburban settings, where the vectors are found in close contact with humans. Scrub typhus is transmitted by the larval stage of a mite associated with transitio...

One-third of net CO(2) emissions to the atmosphere since 1850 are the result of land-use change, primarily from the clearing of forests for timber and agriculture, but quantifying these changes is complicated by the lack of historical data on both former ecosystem conditions and the extent and spatial configuration of subsequent land use. Using fine-resolution historical survey records, we reco...

In this paper we study the optimal forest conservation policy by a hyperbolically discounting society. Society comprises a series of non-overlapping imperfectly altruistic generations each represented by its own government. Under uncertainty about future pay-offs we determine, as solution of an intergenerational dynamic game, the optimal timing of irreversible harvest. Earlier harvest occurs an...

A campaign is underway to clear established forests and expand early-successional habitats—also called young forest, pre-forest, early seral, or open habitats—with the intention of benefitting specific species. Coordinated by federal state wildlife agencies, funded with public money, land managers work closely hunting forestry interests, conservation organizations, trusts, private landowners to...

Other than land clearing for urban development (Wear and others 1998), no disturbance is more common in southern forests than fire. The pervasive role of fire predates human activity in the South (Komarek 1964, 1974), and humans magnified that role. Repeating patterns of fire behavior lead to recognizable fire regimes, with temporal and spatial dimensions. Understanding these fire regimes is es...