Journal ArticleDOI
Deforestation and Reforestation of Latin America and the Caribbean (2001–2010)
T. Mitchell Aide,Matthew L. Clark,H. Ricardo Grau,David López-Carr,Marc A. Levy,Daniel J. Redo,Martha Bonilla-Moheno,George Riner,María José Andrade-Núñez,Maria Muñiz +9 more
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors presented a wall-to-wall, annual maps of change in woody vegetation and other land-cover classes between 2001 and 2010 for each of the 16,050 municipalities in Latin American and the Caribbean region (LAC).Abstract:
Forest cover change directly affects biodiversity, the global carbon budget, and ecosystem function. Within Latin American and the Caribbean region (LAC), many studies have documented extensive deforestation, but there are also many local studies reporting forest recovery. These contrasting dynamics have been largely attributed to demographic and socio-economic change. For example, local population change due to migration can stimulate forest recovery, while the increasing global demand for food can drive agriculture expansion. However, as no analysis has simultaneously evaluated deforestation and reforestation from the municipal to continental scale, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the spatial distribution of these processes. We overcame this limitation by producing wall-to-wall, annual maps of change in woody vegetation and other land-cover classes between 2001 and 2010 for each of the 16,050 municipalities in LAC, and we used nonparametric Random Forest regression analyses to determine which environmental or population variables best explained the variation in woody vegetation change. Woody vegetation change was dominated by deforestation (541,835 km 2 ), particularly in the moist forest, dry forest, and savannas/shrublands biomes in South America. Extensive areas also recovered woody vegetation (+362,430 km 2 ), particularly in regions too dry or too steep for modern agriculture. Deforestation in moist forests tended to occur in lowland areas with low population density, but woody cover change was not related to municipality-scale population change. These results emphasize the importance of quantitating deforestation and reforestation at multiple spatial scales and linking these changes with global drivers such as the global demand for food.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Floristics and Biogeography of Vegetation in Seasonally Dry Tropical Regions
Kyle G. Dexter,B. Smart,Cristina Baldauf,Sophie Fauset,Sophie Fauset,Burkina Faso,Mato Grosso +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide an inter-continental overview of the floristics and biogeography of drought-adapted tropical vegetation formations, and provide a dataset of inventory plots in South America (n = 93), Africa (n=84), and Asia (n/92) from savannas (subject to fire), seasonally dry tropical forests (not generally subject to fire) and moist forests (no fire).
Journal ArticleDOI
What makes ecosystem restoration expensive? A systematic cost assessment of projects in Brazil
Pedro H. S. Brancalion,Paula Meli,Julio R.C. Tymus,Felipe E.B. Lenti,Rubens de Miranda Benini,Ana Paula M. Silva,Ingo Isernhagen,Karen D. Holl +7 more
TL;DR: This article conducted detailed restoration cost assessments for the three most widespread biomes in Brazil (Amazon, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forest) and estimated the restoration costs associated with implementing Brazil's National Plan for Native Vegetation Recovery (12M hectares).
Journal ArticleDOI
Effects of past and future land conversions on forest connectivity in the Argentine Chaco
María Piquer-Rodríguez,Sebastián Torella,Gregorio I. Gavier-Pizarro,José Norberto Volante,Daniel Jorge Somma,Rubén Ginzburg,Tobias Kuemmerle +6 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied changes in the extent, fragmentation, and connectivity of forests between 1977 and 2010, by combining agricultural expansion and forest cover maps, and for the future in a scenario analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’
TL;DR: The authors analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government, and new government policies in the Latin American tropics, and suggests that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Conservation of Tropical Forests in the Anthropocene.
David Edwards,Jacob B. Socolar,Simon C. Mills,Zuzana Burivalova,Lian Pin Koh,David S. Wilcove +5 more
TL;DR: Realizing this better future for tropical forests and people will require formalisation of land tenure for local and indigenous communities, better-enforced environmental laws, the widescale roll-out of payments for ecosystem service schemes, and sustainable intensification of under-yielding farmland, as well as global-scale societal changes.
References
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Random Forests
TL;DR: Internal estimates monitor error, strength, and correlation and these are used to show the response to increasing the number of features used in the forest, and are also applicable to regression.
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Overview of the radiometric and biophysical performance of the MODIS vegetation indices
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the performance and validity of the MODIS vegetation indices (VI), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index(EVI), produced at 1-km and 500-m resolutions and 16-day compositing periods.
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Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth
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Random forest: a classification and regression tool for compound classification and QSAR modeling.
Vladimir Svetnik,Andy Liaw,Christopher Tong,J. Christopher Culberson,Robert P. Sheridan,Bradley P. Feuston +5 more
TL;DR: It is the combination of relatively high prediction accuracy and its collection of desired features that makes Random Forest uniquely suited for modeling in cheminformatics.
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Dynamics of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Tropical Regions
TL;DR: In this article, the authors highlight the complexity of land-use/cover change and propose a framework for a more general understanding of the issue, with emphasis on tropical regions, and argue that a systematic analysis of local-scale land use change studies, conducted over a range of timescales, helps to uncover general principles that provide an explanation and prediction of new land use changes.