the hyrcanian forests have been highly exploited in recent decades by human impacts. easy access, abundance and variety of valuable forest yields have led to population growth density, creation of new residential areas and deforestation activities. change detection is one of the main methods of management and evaluation of natural resources. we investigated forest changes in southern surroundin...

Protected areas (including areas that are nominally fully protected and those managed for multiple uses) encompass about a quarter of the total tropical forest estate. Despite growing interest in the relative value of community-managed lands and protected areas, knowledge about the biodiversity value that each sustains remains scarce in the biodiversity-rich tropics. We investigated the species...

the hastening increase in the population of the cities ,lack of urban infrastructures ,shifting the land use and the consequent vanish of ecologically valuable lands in the countries ,industrial pollutions ,illegal settlement in the suburbs and other human activities which have influenced the growth of cities in iran too ,make it necessary to study and analyze the growth of rasht(the capital of...

Increased development results in the loss of forest, farm, range, and other open space lands that contribute to the quality of life of U.S. residents. I describe an economic rationale for growing public support for preserving local open space, based the growing scarcity of open space lands. I test the rationale empirically by correlating the prevalence of open space referenda in U.S. counties t...

Forest policy throughout Latin America is undergoing a decentralization process in which more of the responsibilities for managing forest resources are delegated to municipal governments, often with mixed success (Larson, 2003). Considered critical for household needs and as biodiversity reserves, forest fragments on private lands comprise one-quarter of the forest resources in developing count...

-The avian community of a mature residential area was studied and compared with an undisturbed climax beech-maple forest. Urbanization was presumed to be responsible for decreasing species richness and diversity, increasing biomass and density, and favoring dominance by a few species. Foraging guilds shifted from forest insectivores that were canopy foliage gleaners or bark drillers to urban gr...

In Mexico, the bdemocratization of natural assetsQ through an agrarian reform process laid the territorial foundation for the establishment of a large community forest sector. The common property regime and agrarian policies established by the Mexican Revolution also created a common form of governance for all of rural Mexico. Concepts from common property theory and social and natural capital ...

Land degradation is a global concern. In tropical areas it primarily concerns the conversion of forest into non-forest lands and the associated losses of environmental services. Defining such degradation is not straightforward hampering effective reduction in degradation and use of already degraded lands for more productive purposes. To facilitate the processes of avoided degradation and land r...

Land-use change around protected areas can reduce their effective size and limit their ability to conserve biodiversity because land-use change alters ecological processes and the ability of organisms to move freely among protected areas. The goal of our analysis was to inform conservation planning efforts for a nationwide network of protected lands by predicting future land use change. We eval...