Slash-and-burn agriculture in poor tropical countries is one of the main causes of deforestation, leading to environmental costs and to potential externality effects on lowland agricultural productivity. Under innovative environmental policies, direct conservation payments to farmers are starting to be implemented to induce them to abandon slash-and-burn agriculture as well as the use of forest...

The TAMM/NAPAP/ATLAS/AREACHANGE (TNAA) system and the Forest and Agriculture Sector Optimization Model (FASOM) are two large-scale forestry sector modeling systems that have been employed to analyze the U.S. forest resource situation. The TNAA system of static, spatial equilibrium models has been applied to make 50-year projections of the U.S. forest sector for more than 20 years. Much of its i...

Intraspecific social behavior can be influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. While much research has focused on how characteristics of individuals influence their roles in social networks, we were interested in the role that landscape structure plays in animal sociality at both individual (local) and population (global) levels. We used female white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianu...

Changes of land use/land cover have a significant impact on runoff by altering the surface evaporation, soil moisture conditions and the amount of trapped ground cover, which directly impact the sustainable development of the watershed ecology. In this paper, based on remote sensing images, we simulate runoff of land-use changes of different slopes using GIS technology and SWAT model in Erhai w...

The Department of Ecology, College of Agriculture, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, PR China; Key Laboratory of Ecological Agriculture of Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, PR China; Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA; Center for Bottomland...

This paper discusses the medicinal herb industry in relation to conservation of medicinal plants, including an overview of sustainable wildcrafting and sustainable forest agriculture. Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) and Black Cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) are given as examples of wild herbs of economic importance which may be readily cultivated. Includes guidelines and techniques for forest fa...

Large tracts of tropical rainforests are being converted into intensive agricultural lands. Such anthropogenic disturbances are known to reduce species turnover across horizontal distances. But it is not known if they can also reduce species turnover across vertical distances (elevation), which have steeper climatic differences. We measured turnover in birds across horizontal and vertical sampl...