1 Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands, 2 Landscape Dynamics Unit, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland, 3 Department of Forest Yield and Silviculture, Slovenian Forestry Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 4 CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain, 5 Laboratory of Plant Biology and Nature Man...

The current mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreak in the southern Rocky Mountains has impacted approximately 750 000 ha of forest. Weather and habitat heterogeneity influence forest insect population dynamics at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Comparison of forest insect population dynamics in two principal host species may elucidate the relative contribution of wea...

The use of the newest methods of airborne laser scanning integrated with hyper-spectral satellite systems, provides principally new opportunities for remote sensing of forest cover. High efficiency of laser scanning (up to 100 thousand measurements per second) in combination with sub-meter spatial resolution, high accuracy of a tree stands’ structural parameters detection as well as three-dimen...

Amazonian rain forest-savanna boundaries are highly sensitive to climatic change and may also play an important role in rain forest speciation. However, their dynamics over millennial time scales are poorly understood. Here, we present late Quaternary pollen records from the southern margin of Amazonia, which show that the humid evergreen rain forests of eastern Bolivia have been expanding sout...

In the boreal biome, fire is the major disturbance agent affecting ecosystem change, and fire dynamics will likely change in response to climatic warming. We modified a spatially explicit model of Alaskan subarctic treeline dynamics (ALFRESCO) to simulate boreal vegetation dynamics in interior Alaska. The model is used to investigate the role of black spruce ecosystems in the fire regime of int...

African forests within the Congo Basin are generally mapped at a regional scale as broad-leaved evergreen forests, with the main distinction being between terra-firme and swamp forest types. At the same time, commercial forest inventories, as well as national maps, have highlighted a strong spatial heterogeneity of forest types. A detailed vegetation map generated using consistent methods is ne...

The north-eastern escarpment of Madagascar harbours the island’s last remaining large-scale humid forest massifs surrounded by a small-scale agricultural mosaic. There is high deforestation, commonly thought to be caused by shifting cultivation practiced by local land users to produce upland rice. However, little is known about the dynamics between forest and shifting cultivation systems at a r...

Coastal temperate rainforests from southeast Alaska through to southern Oregon are ecologically distinct from forests of neighboring regions, which have a drier, or more continental, climate and disturbance regimes dominated by fires. The long-term role of fire remains one of the key outstanding sources of uncertainty in the historical dynamics of the wetter and less seasonal forests that domin...

Understanding the potential of forest ecosystems as global carbon sinks requires a thorough knowledge of forest carbon dynamics, including both sequestration and fluxes among multiple pools. The accurate quantification of biomass is important to better understand forest productivity and carbon cycling dynamics. Stand-based inventories (SBIs) are widely used for quantifying forest characteristic...

Multi-sensor Remote Sensing of Forest Dynamics in Central Siberia K.J. Ranson, G. Sun, V.I. Kharuk and J. Howl 4 1 NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 923, Greenbelt, MD, USA, [email protected] 2 Department of Geography University of Maryland, College Park, USA, [email protected] 3 V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest, Academgorodok, Krasnoyarsk, Russia, [email protected] Sigma Space Cor...