A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal activities associated with drug trafficking networks are a progressively important driver of forest loss in Central America. However, the scale at which drug trafficking represents a driver of forest loss is not presently known. We estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking may contribute to forest loss using an unsupervised spatial clu...

Amid widespread reports of deforestation, some nations have nevertheless experienced transitions from deforestation to reforestation. In a causal relationship, the Forest Identity relates the carbon sequestered in forests to the changing variables of national or regional forest area, growing stock density per area, biomass per growing stock volume, and carbon concentration in the biomass. It qu...

Assessments of forest cover, forest carbon stocks and carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation are increasingly important components of sustainable resource management, for combating biodiversity loss and in climate mitigation policies. Satellite remote sensing provides the only means for mapping global forest cover regularly. However, forest classification with optical data is limit...

Recently there have been reports of forest regrowth occurring in different regions across the world. There is also a growing recognition of the potential beneficial impact that secondary forests may have on the global environment: providing crucial ecosystem services such as soil conservation, stabilization of hydrological cycles, carbon sequestration, and support for forest dependent communiti...

In this paper, we consider the stochastic profile scheduling problem of a partially ordered set of tasks on uniform processors. The set of available processors varies in time. The running times of the tasks are independent random variables with exponential distributions. We obtain a sufficient condition under which a list policy stochastically minimizes the makespan within the class of preempti...

Executive Summary v Glossary of Economic Terms ix 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and hypotheses 1 1.2 Objectives and target audience 1 1.3 Definitions and scope 1 1.4 Structure of paper 4 2. Economics and Forestry: a Conceptual Overview 4 2.1 Introduction 4 2.2 Forestry, economics and public resource allocation 4 2.3 Recent changes in economic and forest policies 5 2.4 The development of envi...

In this paper, we consider the stochastic proole scheduling problem of a partially ordered set of tasks on uniform processors. The set of available processors varies in time. The running times of the tasks are independent random variables with exponential distributions. We obtain a suucient condition under which a list policy stochastically minimizes the makespan within the class of preemptive ...

We estimate the effects of neighbors’ deforestation actions on individuals’ deforestation decisions in Costa Rica. To address simultaneity and the presence of spatially correlated unobservable factors, we instrument for neighboring deforestation using topographic and biological characteristics of neighboring parcels. We find evidence that neighboring deforestation significantly raises the proba...

Forest Ecological Security (FES) means coordinated development of forest ecosystems, social economies, and the forest environment. In this paper, we evaluate FES in Beijing under different designed scenarios using a dynamic systems model and find that first, the initial FES index value (in Scenario 0) increased to its highest level of 0.529 in 2012, but declined slightly to 0.485 by 2020. Secon...