Special sites or areas that have one or more attributes which distinguish them as somehow extraordinary, usually in a religious or spiritual sense, are called sacred places. They tend to evoke a feeling of some awesome, mysterious, and transcendent power that merits special reverence and treatment. Sacred groves are stands of trees or patches of forest that local communities conserve primarily ...

James Harvey and Forest Myers are policy economists in the Division of Supervision and Risk Management of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City or the Federal Reserve System.

Aim Predictions of ecosystem responses to climate warming are often made using gap models, which are among the most effective tools for assessing the effects of climate change on forest composition and structure. Gap models do not generally account for broad-scale effects such as the spatial configuration of the simulated forest ecosystems, disturbance, and seed dispersal, which extend beyond t...

Meadows are natural dynamic features of forested mountain landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Proportions of meadows and forests change with environmental conditions and disturbance history. We investigated the belowground microbial communities associated with these two vegetation types and how they change across the meadow–forest transition at two sites in Oregon. Soils were sampled along rep...

Sustainable forest conservation strategies should be based on local as well as landscape-scale forest resource use data. Using ecological and sociological techniques, we test the hypotheses that (1) forest resource use differs between ethnic and socioeconomic indigenous groups and (2) that this difference results in differing spatial patterns of resource use, with implications for forest divers...

BACKGROUND Majority of the people in rural areas depend on traditional fungi-based medicines to combat different illnesses. This ethnomycological survey was undertaken to document the traditional knowledge of mushrooms among the communities in the Kilum-Ijim mountain forest reserve. Although macrofungi are exploited for food and medicine, their ethnomycological knowledge has not been documented...

Abstract Human activity in African tropical rainforests continues to threaten wild mammals. Many rural communities are dependent on hunting, yet there is a widespread lack of baseline data ecology and the sustainability hunting. We investigated impacts human mammal species composition distributions within community forest surrounding village buffer zone Dja Biosphere Reserve south-east Cameroon...

Gap phase dynamics are the dominant mode of forest turnover in tropical forests. However, gap processes are infrequently studied at the landscape scale. Airborne lidar data offer detailed information on three-dimensional forest structure, providing a means to characterize fine-scale (1 m) processes in tropical forests over large areas. Lidar-based estimates of forest structure (top down) differ...

Calakmul is a large expanse of tropical forest that is continuous with the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén Province of Northern Guatemala. Calakmul biosphere reserve covers an area of 723,000 hectares, but is attached to two state reserves Balam-kim and Balam-ku which run the entire length of the western side of the biosphere. The total area covered by these connected reserves is 1,200,000 ...

BACKGROUND An ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants was carried out in 14 villages adjacent to Mabira Central Forest Reserve (CFR) in Central Uganda between August 2013 and March 2014. METHODS Information was obtained through interviews using semi- structured questionnaires. Field excursions with traditional healers and herbal medicine collectors were carried out. Descriptive statistics we...