The potential impact of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere calls for policies that take account of changes in forest cover. Although much research has focused on the location and effects of deforestation, little is known about the distribution and reasons for the agricultural uses that replace forest cover. We used Landsat TM-based deforestation ...

Agriculture, Forest and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector contributes about a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission [1] though its contribution is small in Japan [2]. In addition, technologies to reduce GHGs from agriculture sector are not expensive [3]. It is therefore worth reducing GHGs from this sector. It includes soil carbon (C) sequestration and mitigation of methane (CH4) and Nitr...

The conservation of biodiversity within tropical forest regions does not lie only in the maintenance of natural forest areas, but on conservation strategies directed toward agricultural land types within which they are embedded. This study investigated variations in bird assemblages of different functional groups of forest-dependent birds in three agricultural land types, relative to distance f...

ECOSYSTEMS CAN BE MODELED AT MANY different hierarchical levels. The phenomenon being simulated has a context represented by the next higher level of ecosystem organization, as well as driving mechanisms represented by the next lower level of ecosystem organization. In this sense, the level at which mechanisms are represented in models of tree crowns depends on the crown attributes or processes...

Can economic forces be harnessed for biodiversity conservation? The answer hinges on characterizing the value of nature, a tricky business from biophysical, socioeconomic, and ethical perspectives. Although the societal benefits of native ecosystems are clearly immense, they remain largely unquantified for all but a few services. Here, we estimate the value of tropical forest in supplying polli...

the purpose of this study was identifying rangeland development andrestoration operations targets. this study was conducted in hossein abad bazoft basinwith 7162 ha area, located in south east of farsan county, chaharmahal and bakhtiariprovince, iran. the basin has various land uses including rangeland, forest, irrigated farmand garden, dry farm, residential area and rock mass. in this study, d...

the aim of this study was to assess the relative efficiency of the iranian forest management plans using the non-parametric method – data envelopment analysis (dea) as a well-known and robust technique for measuring the relative efficiency of organizations. the relative efficiency of forest management plans was calculated using the most frequency dea models such as global technical efficiency (...

Forests in lowland Bolivia suffer from severe deforestation caused by different types of agents and land use activities. We identify three major proximate causes of deforestation. The largest share of deforestation is attributable to the expansion of mechanized agriculture, followed by cattle ranching and small-scale agriculture. We utilize a spatially explicit multinomial logit model to analyz...

Recent drought and population growth are planting unprecedented demand for the use of available limited water resources. Irrigated agriculture is one of the major consumers of fresh water. Huge amount of water in irrigated agriculture is wasted due to poor water management practices. To improve water management in irrigated areas, models for estimation of future water requirements are needed. D...

The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called ‘landscape mosaic’ as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible landsc...