Forests around the world are under immense pressure from human land use and climate change, however vastly improved remote sensing techniques can help identify where forests are under greatest stress from a wide range of human-caused and climate risks.
Primary forests are spatially diverse terrestrial ecosystems with unique characteristics, being naturally regenerative and heterogeneous, which supports the stability of their carbon storage through the accumulation of live and dead biomass. Yet, little is known about the interactions between biomass stocks, tree genus diversity and structure across a temperate montane primary forest.
The uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by terrestrial ecosystems is critical for moderating climate change. To protect the carbon sink, land management policies are needed to limit deforestation, promote forest restoration and improve timber-harvesting practices.
Restoration of forest ecosystems by allowing continued growth of regenerating forests, active restoration measures, and re-connecting fragmented remnants across landscapes, will provide crucial mitigation benefits that contribute to emissions reduction targets as well as existing and future co-benefits.
Building the capacity of marginalised groups by increasing their skills and raising awareness about sustainable forest management could have tangible impacts on the ground, including the protection and conservation of Nepal’s unique flora and fauna into an uncertain and difficult future.
Building the capacity of marginalised groups by increasing their skills and raising awareness about sustainable forest management could have tangible impacts on the ground, including the protection and conservation of Nepal’s unique flora and fauna into an uncertain and difficult future.
The DRC has over 100 million hectares of forest and has significant potential to benefit from these forests through REDD+ if they are managed effectively. The research shows that building the right capacity, consulting and accessing the needs of the community, and building long-term projects and partnerships are key success factors for improving forest governance.
Payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes are programmes that compensate forest communities for refraining from undertaking extractive uses, such as mining, intensive logging, and clearing. PES schemes can be important policy tools in meeting climate targets but effective deployment demands an understanding of local deforestation drivers and host communities’ preferences.
This study investigated the range if views from multiple stakeholders on the quality of existing forest management strategies that support the protection of the famous Red Panda in Nepal.
Rules and guidelines that treat forests equally in key international policy frameworks regardless of their risk profiles limit their effectiveness and can facilitate forest degradation. Here we assess the potential for using a framework of ecosystem integrity to guide policy goals.
Forest stability is a key component of ecosystem integrity and primary forests. Current remote sensing products largely focus on deforestation rather than forest degradation, and depend on machine learning calibrated with extensive field measurements. To address this, we used MODIS time series to develop a novel approach for mapping forest stability across forest biomes.
The red panda is a unique species known for its distinct biological and ecological characteristics, and its captivating appearance but its future remains uncertain. This study assessed the history of conservation studies over 193 years.
Mature and old-growth forests of the United States collectively support exceptional levels of biodiversity but have declined substantially from logging and development.
Capacity building activities done through REDD+ schemes can meet the many technical needs but there are likely a number of systemic capacity needs that are unlikely to be addressed through existing processes. Missing are education and training in governance and management, as well as fundamental education in sustainability. Failure to address these needs risks undermining any implementation of REDD+.
British Columbia contains under-appreciated carbon stocks, which if protected, can help Canada meet its climate and conservation targets, but only if there are major forestry reforms to protect carbon-dense old-growth forests.
Effective planning is a key pillar of landscape management, but there are limited tools for evaluating planning, especially where planning is informal or nascent. This paper outlines a novel and robust principles, criteria and indicators framework for evaluating planning in contexts where there is limited formal planning.
The number of studies on valuation of forest ecosystem services is increasing over time, but limited in covering important regions and forest types. The values are diverse in nature for different forest features and ecological zones. The economic value is greatest when the ecosystem services are considered together, instead of when individual extractive uses are used in insolation.
Economic studies published between 1990 and 2018 from primary forests around the world were reviewed to create a database of forest values. This database represents a ‘meta-analysis’ of the economic values of global forest ecosystem services in a readily comparable measure.
Historical forest disturbance have an impact on forest ecosystem co-benefits and trade-offs. Accounting for long-term variations of past disturbances can improve policies aimed at mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.
Using remote sensing time series, we found increasing trends in fire and logging disturbances in primary forests of the Angara case study region. We also found large increases in fires closer to human settlements, roads, and logged sites.
This study focuses on REDD+ as a market-based mechanism in the voluntary carbon market. It assesses the viability of using REDD+ on Indigenous lands, in this case the Brazilian Amazon and examines three key aspects of REDD+: the legal, technical and market requirements.
Integrated landscape management of forest landscapes requires ecosystem integrity, effective planning and strong governance. Integrated landscape approaches to forest management are more holistic than conventional sector-based approaches and provide a more promising approach to sustainable management.
The world’s contain irreplaceable biodiversity and are critical to the regulation of the global climate and maintaining stable carbon pools. Carbon-dense primary forests are found in every major forest biome and they typically support higher levels of biodiversity than logged forests, especially imperiled and endemic species, yet their value is not fully recognised in climate policy.
There is a convincing body of evidence shows that, as it is presently codified, sustainable forest-management logging implemented at an industrial scale guarantees commercial and biological depletion of high-value timber species within three harvests in all three major tropical forest regions.