Governments around the world have enacted a variety of orest and watershed management policies intended to address range of natural resource issues. Examples include policies hat address reforestation following timber harvest in Europe e.g., Bauer et al., 2004) and water quantity and quality protecion in South Africa (e.g., South African National Water Act, 998). Although often effective, such ...

China’s Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), introduced in 1998 and 1999, respectively, are integral parts of the world’s largest reforestation effort. Statereported forest cover data indicate effective policy implementation through net forest cover expansion but overlook the scale-dependence of and spatial variation in forest cover change pattern...

The Forest Monitoring Service Element of the Global Monitoring for Environmental and Security initiative aims to provide improved forest monitoring (based on space technologies) for the European and global environment. The Service Portfolio provided information on yearly carbon balance, forest disturbance data as well as information for practical forest and land use management operations for bo...

There are two competing hypotheses about the structure and dynamics of primeval forests in lowland Europe: the high-forest and the wood-pasture hypotheses, both of which influence current European forest conservation policies. In a recent study using pollen-analytical data from across lowland Europe, Mitchell provides support for rejecting the wood-pasture hypothesis. His study is important for...

Deforestation and biomass decay have accounted for approximately 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2007).1 This raises concerns about the extent of forest clearings in the Amazon, the planet’s largest rainforest tract. The region has long been the world’s most active agricultural frontier in terms of forest loss and CO2 emissions. In Brazil, the conversion of forest areas in the Def...

The problems of the environmental management in river basins are treated as periphery problems. Though, these areas are often included in great reserves of natural resources of the nation, their contribution to the main land is quite often in terms of forest, water, wildlife, tourism and leisure industries. Forest and forest eco-systems of north-east India in general and Manipur in particular, ...

We used spatial simulation models to evaluate how current and two alternative policies might affect potential biodiversity over 100 years in the Coast Ranges Physiographic Province of Oregon. This 2.3-million-ha province is characterized by a diversity of public and private forest owners, and a wide range of forest policy and management objectives. We evaluated habitat availability for seven fo...

Note. This original form of this rebuttal was submitted to Science on 3 March 2017 (limited to 300 words as per Science editorial policy) but rejected on 13 March 2017. Herein, we elaborate on our original Science submission in order to more fully address the issue without the length limitations. This rebuttal is followed by the list of the signatories who supported our original submission.

Carbon leakage can be a problem when seeking to reduce carbon emissions through forest policy. International market leakage is mainly caused by supply and demand imbalances in the timber market. This paper selects China, which is implementing forestry policy changes, as the research object. We begin by offering a brief analysis of China’s forestry policy changes, such as the logging quota and S...