[1] Degradation of cattle pastures is a management concern that influences future land use in Amazonia. However, ‘‘degradation’’ is poorly defined and has different meanings for ranchers, ecologists, and policy makers. Here we analyze pasture degradation using objective scalars of photosynthetic vegetation (PV), nonphotosynthetic vegetation (NPV), and exposed soil (S) derived from Landsat image...

Despite growing evidence for an effect of species composition on carbon (C) storage and sequestration, few projects have examined the implications of such a relationship for forestry and agriculture-based climate change mitigation activities. We worked with a community in Eastern Panama to determine the average aboveand below-ground C stocks of three land-use types in their territory: managed f...

Quantitative knowledge of stabilizationand decomposition processes is necessary to understand, assess and predict effects of land use changes on storage and stability of soil organic carbon (soil C) in the tropics. Although it is well documented that different soil types have different soil C stocks, it is presently unknown how different soil types affect the stability of recently formed soil C...

Understanding successional trends in energy and matter exchange across the ecosystem-atmosphere boundary layer is an essential focus in ecological research; however, a general theory describing the observed pattern remains elusive. This paper examines whether the principle of maximum entropy production could provide the solution. A general framework is developed for calculating entropy producti...

For the past two decades, there has been extensive debate on the destructive interaction between beef production and tropical forests in Latin America. The primary concern has been deforestation to provide land for pasture and cattle production. Beef production has been part of the land use mosaic in the Bolivian lowlands for centuries and will undoubtedly remain so for the foreseeable future. ...

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...

Conventional ranching in Chiapas, Mexico includes a yearly pasture burn and agrochemical use that decreases the biodiversity and forest cover of ranch lands. Ranchers, self-described members of a “club” in the Fraylesca region of Chiapas, Mexico, have bucked convention and eliminated burns and agrochemicals from their systems after decades of use because they believed that the land and their pr...

We assessed the effects of deforestation on soil carbon (C) and nutrient stocks in the premontane landscape near Las Cruces Biological Station in southern Costa Rica, where forests were cleared for pasture in the mid-1960s. We excavated six soil pits to a depth of 1 m in both pasture and primary forest, and found that C stocks were ~20 kg C/m in both settings. Nevertheless, soil dC suggests ~50...