Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Here, using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass within the first 500 m of the forest edge is on...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have increasingly been implemented to protect and restore ecosystems worldwide. The effectiveness of conservation investments in PES may differ under alternative policy scenarios and may not be sustainable because of uncertainties in human responses to policies and dynamic human-nature interactions. To assess the impacts of these interactions on the effecti...

Emergency surgeon: “ last of the mohicans” 2014-2016 editorial policy WSESWJES: position papers, guidelines, courses, books and original research; from WJES impact factor to WSES congress impact factor Fausto Catena, Frederick Moore, Luca Ansaloni, Ari Leppäniemi, Massimo Sartelli, Andrew B Peitzmann, Walt Biffl, Federico Coccolini, Salomone Di Saverio, Belinda De Simone, Michele Pisano and Ern...

Governments around the world are increasingly devolving authority for forest management to the local level in an attempt to strengthen the management of national forests. Community forestry programs are recognized as providing a range of economic and social benefits and having a positive impact on increasing forest cover. However, concerns have been raised about the capability of user groups to...

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion on the working of village forest institutions (VFI) in developing countries with a view to understanding their role as rural institutions. In a tropical country like India, the success of any community based forest management effort largely depends on the emergence as well as role played by the institutions at local village level, which ...

Based on the survey data of 364 peasant households in Yibin, Sichuan, this paper analyzes the farmer’s willingness to small forest tenure mortgage loans. The result indicates a high willingness up to 74.2%, i.e. the farmers are willing to invest forest tenure mortgage loans into forestry and agricultural production. The influential factors on farmer’s willingness to small forest tenure mortgage...

a r t i c l e i n f o Deforestation is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and an important source of global carbon emissions. This means that there are important synergies between climate policy and conservation policy. The highest rates of deforestation occur in tropical countries, where much of the land at the forest frontier is managed informally by smallholders and where governance system...