Forest cover is an important input variable for assessing changes to carbon stocks, climate and hydrological systems, biodiversity richness, and other sustainability science disciplines. Despite incremental improvements in our ability to quantify rates of forest clearing, there is still no definitive understanding on global trends. Without timely and accurate forest monitoring methods, policy r...

Landsat remote sensing of the central African humid tropics is confounded by persistent cloud cover and, since 2003, missing data due to the Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM + ) scan line corrector (SLC) malfunction. To quantify these limitations and their effects on contemporary forest cover and change characterization, a comparison was made of multiple Landsat-7 image mosaics gene...

Unsustainable farming practices such as shifting cultivation and slash-and-burn agriculture in the humid tropics threaten the preservation of the rainforest and the health of the local and global environment. In weathered soils prone to cohesion in humid tropic due to low Fe and carbon content and the enormous amounts of P that can be adsorbed, sustainable soil use is heavily dependent on the a...

Changes in Heat Index (a combined measure of temperature and humidity) associated with global warming are evaluated based on the output from four extended integrations of the GFDL coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model. The four integrations are: a control with constant levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), a second integration in which an estimate of the combined radiative forcing of gre...

The coastal ecosystems of French Guiana are very complex and changing due to the presence of huge quantities of mud originating from the Amazon. have been studied for more than a decade. Due to access difficulties through both land and sea, the use of remote sensing has always been essential, and the understanding of the complex landscapes was greatly improved when airborne and spaceborne imagi...

Dioscorea cayenensis and Dioscorea rotundata are among the most important yam species for the humid and sub-humid tropics. We isolated nine polymorphic microsatellite markers using a microsatellite-enriched genomic library technique. The nine primer pairs were validated in 22 D. cayenensis accessions, and were tested for transferability in 26 D. rotundata accessions. The number of bands ranged ...

Agriculture is the human enterprise that is most vulnerable to climate change. Tropical agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture is particularly vulnerable, as smallholder farmers do not have adequate resources to adapt to climate change. While agroforestry may play a significant role in mitigating the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHG), it also has a role to play in he...