Socioecology Research Today

Protected forests are sometimes encroached by surrounding communities. But patterns of cover change can vary even within one given setting – understanding these complexities can offer insights into the effective maintenance of forest cover. Using satellite image analyses together with historical information, population census data and interviews with local informants, we analysed the drivers of [...]

Here, water-quality data sets from water-treatment facilities in Colorado were analysed to determine whether the municipal water supply has been perturbed by tree mortality. Results demonstrate higher total organic carbon concentrations along with significantly more DBPs at water-treatment facilities using mountain-pine-beetle-infested source waters when contrasted with those using water from control watersheds. In addition to [...]

Here we show that forecasted changes in temperature and precipitation may have severe economic consequences. On the basis of our model results, the expected value of European forest land will decrease owing to the decline of economically valuable species in the absence of effective countermeasures. We found that by 2100—depending on the interest rate and [...]

Land-use change between forestry and agriculture can cause large net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the respective land uses associated with forest and pasture lead to different on-going emission rates of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) and different surface albedo. Here, we quantify the overall net radiative forcing and consequent temperature change from [...]

Recent estimates of additional land available for bioenergy production range from 320 to 1411 million ha. These estimates were generated from four scenarios regarding the types of land suitable for bioenergy production using coarse-resolution inputs of soil productivity, slope, climate, and land cover. In this paper, these maps of land availability were assessed using high-resolution [...]

In the Western Australian wheatbelt, the restoration of native eucalypt forests for managing degraded agricultural landscapes is a critical part of managing dryland salinity and rebuilding biodiversity. Such reforestation will also sequester carbon. Whereas most investigative emphasis has been on carbon stored in biomass, the effects of reforestation on soil organic carbon (SOC) stores and [...]

We combine data collected from the past 40 years to estimate the indirect effects of sea otters (Enhydra lutris) on ecosystem carbon (C) production and storage across their North American range, from Vancouver Island to the western edge of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. We find that sea otters, by suppressing sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus spp) populations, allow [...]

To judge from India’s official surveys, the protection of its forests is a success. Somehow, this resource-hungry country of 1.2 billion people is managing to preserve its rich forests almost intact in the face of growing demands for timber and agricultural land.But a senior official responsible for assessing the health of the nation’s forests says [...]

Forest cover and forest cover loss for the last decade, 2000–2010, have been quantified for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) using Landsat time-series data set. This was made possible via an exhaustive mining of the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM +) archive. A total of 8881 images were processed to create multi-temporal [...]

Policies to reduce emissions from deforestation would benefit from clearly derived, spatially explicit, statistically bounded estimates of carbon emissions. Existing efforts derive carbon impacts of land-use change using broad assumptions, unreliable data, or both. We improve on this approach using satellite observations of gross forest cover loss and a map of forest carbon stocks to [...]