The Amazon Basin is one of the world's most important bioregions, harboring a rich array of plant and animal species and offering a wealth of goods and services to society. For years, ecological science has shown how large scale forest clearings cause declines in biodiversity and the availability of forest products. Yet some important changes in the rainforests, and in the ecosystem services th...

Farmers’ practices in the management of agricultural landscapes influence biodiversity with implications for livelihoods, ecosystem service provision, and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we examined how smallholding farmers in an agricultureforest mosaic landscape in southwestern Ethiopia manage trees and forests with regard to a few selected ecosystem services and disservices that th...

The JRC demonstrated the feasibility to assess and report in a harmonized manner, forest landscape pattern and fragmentation in Europe, on the basis of an easily reproducible set of indices. Results were used in the Forest EUROPE, UN ECE and FAO joint ministerial reporting process on the protection of forests in Europe where data on forest pattern do not exist from national forest inventories. ...

Carbon and water cycling of forests contribute significantly to the Earth's overall biogeochemical cycling and may be affected by disturbance and climate change. As a larger body of research becomes available about leaf-level, ecosystem and regional scale effects of disturbances on forest ecosystems, a more mechanistic understanding is developing which can improve modeling efforts. Here, we sum...

Human well-being highly depends on ecosystem services and this dependence is expected to increase in the future with increasing population and economic growth. Studies that investigate trade-offs between ecosystem services are urgently needed for informing policy-makers. We examine the trade-offs between a provisioning (revenues from timber selling) and regulating (carbon storage and sequestrat...

Characterized by their openness, complexity and large scale, forest ecosystems interweave themselves with social system, economic system and other natural ecosystems, thus complicating both their researches and management decision-making. According to the theories of sustainable development, hierarchy-competence levels, cybernetics and feedback, 25 factors have been chosen from human society, e...

The present investigation of forest ecosystem was undertaken during May 2010 to Dec 2010. The main aim of the study was to analyze the impact of biotic interferences on Yousmarg forest ecosystem. The cumulative effect of the biotic interferences was signif icantly seen in the reduction of vegetation cover. The present study revealed that the prominent factor for the exploitation of the vegetati...

In many parts of the world forest disturbance regimes have intensified recently, and future climatic changes are expected to amplify this development further in the coming decades. These changes are increasingly challenging the main objectives of forest ecosystem management, which are to provide ecosystem services sustainably to society and maintain the biological diversity of forests. Yet a co...

The JRC demonstrated the feasibility to assess and report in a harmonized manner, forest landscape pattern and fragmentation in Europe, on the basis of an easily reproducible set of indices. Results were used in the Forest EUROPE, UN ECE and FAO joint ministerial reporting process on the protection of forests in Europe where data on forest pattern do not exist from national forest inventories. ...

The hierarchical system of forest ecosystem models based on the theory of individual-based (structured) models of populations and communities is briefly described. New self-thinning models are integrated with tree stand models within a hierarchical system of models, aimed at assessing (quasi-) stable states of a forest ecosystem under given environment and management. Within the structural mode...