With 207 million ha of forest covering 22% of its land area, China ranks fifth in the world in forest area. Rapid economic growth, climate change, and forest disturbances pose new, complex challenges for forest research and management. Progress in meeting these challenges is relevant beyond China, because China's forests represent 34% of Asia's forests and 5% of the worlds' forests. To provide ...

Pakistan has only a meagre amount of forest cover, and that is depleting rapidly, with ineffective governance seen as a major reason. The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the country’s most forested province, has carried out a series of interventions with financial and technical support from various international donors. These aim to change how forests are governed, making planning and managem...

Like Archimedes who demanded a place to stand so that he could move the Earth, scientific journals also need a firm point to stand on. We use this example because it stresses the importance of determining the journal’s specific research field by editorial policies. One of the basic strategies for medical journals is to define their scope, which helps them to target specific readership, attract ...

Statistical significance tests (SSTs) have been the object of much controversy among social scientists. Proponents have hailed SSTs as an objective means for minimizing the likelihood that chance factors have contributed to research results; critics have both questioned the logic underlying SSTs and bemoaned the widespread misapplication and misinterpretation of the results of these tests. The ...

Fo re st ry B rie fin g N um be r 4, M ay 2 00 3 Introduction A major reason for the high failure rate of rural development forestry projects is the weak economic incentives for local forest users and other stakeholders to participate in sustainable forest management (SFM). In view of the high dependency of the rural poor on forests for their livelihoods, this has serious poverty implications. ...

Forest fires are an important environmental problem. This paper describes a methodology for constructing an intelligent system which aims to support the human expert's decision making in fire control. The idea is based on first implementing a fire spread simulator and on searching for good decision policies by reinforcement learning (RL). RL algorithms optimize policies by letting the agents in...

The tropical deforestation literature advocates multi-agent enquiry in recognition that key dynamics arise from inter-agent interactions. Studies of tropical forest-cover gain have lagged in this respect. This article explores the roles and key aspects of interactions shaping natural forest regeneration and active reforestation in Eastern Panama since 1990. It employs household surveys of agric...

Article history: Received 19 October 2016 Received in revised form 23 February 2017 Accepted 12 June 2017 Available online xxxx ‘Nonet loss’ (NNL) policies involve quantifying biodiversity impacts associatedwith economic development, and implementing commensurate conservation gains to balance losses. Local stakeholders are often affected by NNL biodiversity trades. But to what extent are NNL pr...

This paper studies optimal forest policies in an overlapping generations forest economy with one-sided altruism and public goods, where timber and monetary bequests can be made across generations. We extend the existing economics literature by demonstrating that timber bequests can dominate money bequests in many situations, and that timber bequests may even be operative in dynamically ineffici...

Large wild fires occurring in forests, grasslands, and chaparral in the last few years have aroused much public concern. Many have described these events as “catastrophes” that must be prevented through aggressive increases in forest thinning. Yet the real catastrophes are not the fires themselves but those land uses, in concert with fire-suppression policies that have resulted in dramatic alte...