Forest insects and pathogens (FIPs) have enormous impacts on community dynamics, carbon storage and ecosystem services, however, ecosystem modelling of FIPs is limited due to their variability in severity and extent. We present a general framework for modelling FIP disturbances through their impacts on tree ecophysiology. Five pathways are identified as the basis for functional groupings: incre...

Evolving Knowledge Ecosystems were proposed recently to approach the Big Data challenge, following the hypothesis that knowledge evolves in a way similar to biological systems. Therefore, the inner working of the knowledge ecosystem can be spotted from natural evolution. An evolving knowledge ecosystem consists of Knowledge Organisms, which form a representation of the knowledge, and the enviro...

Our knowledge about land-use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is mostly limited to single trophic levels, leaving us uncertain about whole-community biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. We analyse consequences of the globally important land-use transformation from tropical forests to oil palm plantations. Species diversity, density and biomass of invertebrate commu...

A. H. FULLERTON*, K. M. BURNETT , E. A. STEEL, R. L . FLITCROFT, G. R. PESS* , B . E. FEIST* , C. E . TORGERSEN , D. J . MILLER AND B.L. SANDERSON* *NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, U.S.A. USDA Forest Service and Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, U.S.A. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Olympia, WA, U.S.A. USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Sci...

Positive feedbacks between vegetation and fire disturbance may lead to nonlinear ecosystem responses to variation in fire regime. We used a cellular automaton model of fire|vegetation dynamics based on pine savanna communities to explore the potential for fire|vegetation feedbacks to lead to ecological thresholds and abrupt transitions between alternate ecosystem states. We show that (i) ecosys...

Introduction Community Based Forestry (CBF) implies commitment to the long term ecological, economic and social well being of forest dependent communities. CBF, or community scale sustainable forestry, constitutes a departure from industrial forestry due to this commitment to the preservation of the ecological integrity of the forest ecosystem in perpetuity and to the maintenance or improvement...

Long-range regional projections of the changes in forest type areas are important in public and private forest resources planning. The combination of natural forces and human activities, which are shaped by socioeconomic forces such as population and income trends, has led to striking changes in forest cover types for the three major types of private owners. A model for the U.S. Southeast is pr...

There is increasing interest worldwide regarding managing plantation forests in a manner that maintains or improves timber production, enhances ecosystem services, and promotes long-term sustainability of forest resources. We selected the Gan River Basin, the largest catchment of Poyang Lake and a region with a typical plantation distribution in South China, as the study region. We evaluated an...

Quantifying the amount of forest and change in the amount of forest are key to ensure that appropriate management practices and policies are in place to maintain the array of ecosystem services provided by forests. There are a range of analytical techniques and data available to estimate these forest parameters, however, not all ‘forest’ is the same and various components of change have been pr...

In the United States and Canada, pine forest ecosystems are being dramatically affected by an unprecedented pine beetle infestation attributed to climate change. Both decreased frequency of extremely cold days and warmer winter temperature averages have led to an enphytotic devastating millions of acres of pine forest. The associated ecosystem disruption has the potential to cause significant h...