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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Accelerating tropical cloud forest recovery: Performance of nine late-successional tree species
TL;DR: The results show that these threatened mid- and late-successional native species can be successfully matched to microsite conditions and established in degraded areas as a strategy by which to secure their presence and accelerate forest recovery.
Journal ArticleDOI
Examining the relationship between migration and forest cover change in Mexico from 2001 to 2010
TL;DR: The authors examined the relationship between migration, population, and economic processes, and forest cover change in Mexico from 2001 to 2010 using multiple regression analyses with remotely-sensed, significant (p
Journal ArticleDOI
Short-term effects of forest management on soil microbial biomass and activity in caatinga dry forest, Brazil
Patrícia Anjos Bittencourt Barreto-Garcia,Suellen Gomes Monteiro Batista,Emanuela Forestieri Gama-Rodrigues,Alessandro de Paula,Willyan Charles Amaral Batista +4 more
TL;DR: In this paper, three types of forest management were evaluated (CC, SCD, and SCS) using unmanaged Caatinga (UC) as a reference, and the results showed that CC and SCD significantly reduced the activity and C transformation of soil microbial biomass in the short-term, while SCS less intensely affected these variables, approaching the unmanaged forest condition.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reforestation reversals and forest transitions
TL;DR: This paper explored reversals in relation to land-change dynamics commonly linked to reforestation and further frame reversals as inherent features of emergent tropical forest transitions, advancing a 'pulsed' forest-transition model and emphasizing that apparent reversals may not entail waning reforestation trajectories.
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The Rio Branco Declaration: Assessing Progress Toward a Near-Term Voluntary Deforestation Reduction Target in Subnational Jurisdictions Across the Tropics
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the Rio Branco Declaration (RBD) and 30 first-order subnational jurisdictions located in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru that signed on to it between 2014 and 2018, committing to reduce deforestation 80% by 2020, conditional upon adequate financial support from the international community.
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.