The paper uses the experiences of selected rural communities in the Offinso Forest District of Ghana to demonstrate how the Modified Taungya System (MTS) as a decentralized forest governance strategy enhances the resilience of local people to escape poverty through enhanced livelihoods and simultaneously restores degraded forest resources. The underpinning objective of the study was to ascertai...

Terrestrial mammals are a key component of tropical forest communities as indicators of ecosystem health and providers of important ecosystem services. However, there is little quantitative information about how they change with local, regional and global threats. In this paper, the first standardized pantropical forest terrestrial mammal community study, we examine several aspects of terrestri...

We studied the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project (NKMCAP), Bolivia, to assess whether forest protection carbon (C) projects can significantly benefit local people. We hypothesized that forest protection can only securely deliver C if significant stakeholders are meaningfully and transparently involved, traditional or customary rights are recognized and their loss compensated for, and t...

Setting aside protected areas is a key strategy for tackling biodiversity loss. Reserve effectiveness depends on the extent to which protected areas capture both known occurrences and areas likely to support the species. We assessed the effectiveness of the existing reserve network for Leadbeater's Possum (Gymnobelideus leadbeateri) and other forest-dependent species, and compared the existing ...

A forest management plan is a document that guides of formally managed forest. The general description component plan, which describes the target and focal landscape in socioeconomic ecological terms. This paper gives as part for implementation pilot REDD+ project Masito Community Forest Reserve, Kigoma, Tanzania 2012-2017. methodology used to obtain data information was literature review. give...

Countries at the United Nations Framework on the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have decided to engage local communities and indigenous groups into the activities for the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of the program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and increase carbon removals (REDD+). Previous research and projects have shown that communities ...

The future of biodiversity and ecosystem services depends largely on the capacity of human-dominated ecosystems to support them, yet this capacity remains largely unknown. Using the framework of countryside biogeography, and working in the Las Cruces system of Coto Brus, Costa Rica, we assessed reptile and amphibian assemblages within four habitats that typify much of the Neotropics: sun coffee...

Recent decades have seen a rapid movement towards decentralising forest rights and tenure to local communities and indigenous groups in both developing and developed nations. Attribution of local and community rights to forests appears to be gathering increasing momentum in many tropical developing countries. Greater local control of forest resources is a response to the failure of government a...

A multi-agent model of social and environmental complexity of deforestation was developed for the Caparo Forest Reserve, Venezuela. It includes three types of agents: settlers, government, and lumber concessionaires. Settlers represent people of limited economic resources that deforest and occupy reserve land to grow crops and eventually claim property rights of this land. Their agricultural pr...

Community assembly rules specify patterns of species co-occurrence and morphology dictated by interspecific competition. We collected data on the occurrence of groundforaging ant species in 22 ombrotrophic bogs and adjacent forest plots of New England to test two general assembly rules: reduced co-occurrence of species among communities, and even spacing of body sizes of species within communit...