Historically, both conservation research and policy have concentrated on primary forests. Increasingly, however, the focus is being broadened to include human-dominated landscapes, such as agroforestry systems, managed forests, hedgerows, and fallow lands. One reason is that considerable research has demonstrated that such landscapes can provide many of the same ecological services as primary f...

Opinions about public lands and the actions of private non-industrial forest owners in the western United States play important roles in forested landscape management as both public and private forests face increasing risks from large wildfires, pests and disease. This work presents the responses from two surveys, a random-sample telephone survey of more than 1500 residents and a mail survey ta...

Can social inequality be seen imprinted in a forest landscape? We studied the relationship between land holding, land use, and inequality in a peasant community in the Peruvian Amazon where farmers practice swidden-fallow cultivation. Longitudinal data on land holding, land use, and land cover were gathered through field-level surveys (n = 316) and household interviews (n = 51) in 1994/1995 and...

Oregon's land-use planning program is often cited as an exemplary approach to forest and farmland conservation, but analyses of its effectiveness are limited. This article examines Oregon's land-use planning program using detailed spatial data describing building densities in western Oregon. An empirical model describes changes in building densities on forest and agricultural lands from 1974 to...

In the Congo Basin, smallholder farmers practice slash-and-burn shifting cultivation. Yet, deliberate burning might no longer be sustainable under reduced fallow scenarios. We synthesized data from the Forest Margins Benchmark Area (FMBA), comprising 1.54 million hectares (ha), in southern Cameroon and assessed the impact of fire exclusion on yield, labor inputs, soil fertility, ecosystem carbo...

Rubber is the most widespread smallholder tree crop in South-East Asia. Although initially large estates planted the bulk of the region’s rubber, smallholders soon captured most of the production. Currently, Indonesia’s rubber plantations cover 3.4 million ha, of which smallholders account for more than 75% (BPS, 1999). In peninsular Malaysia, the area in rubber has declined since the 1970s, bu...