Foresters Articles
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APL in the Field: Powertainer install at UNM Morris - University of Minnesota, Morris, Minnesota - Case Study
In a partnership with Cummins Inc., APL worked with University of Minnesota in Morris to develop a prototype shipping-container-based 100 kW genset running on Minnesota's plentiful agricultural waste corn cobs. With the help of a grant from the California Energy Commission, APL is currently partnered with University of California, Berkeley's Center for Forestry and their Renewable and Appropriate ...
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Rural communities and protected area management in the Mount Cameroon Region of West Africa
This study is aimed at highlighting aspects of the management of protected areas within rural communities in the Mount Cameroon Region of West Africa. The region is characterised by rapid exploration of the natural forest through illegal practices of poaching. This has led to the rapid extinction of animals such as the drills. This has been a major problem as it impedes sustainable forest ...
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Model forecasts long-term impacts of forest land-use decisions
The drive to develop crops for use as biofuel, continues to raise questions about additional uses of forest land. A cutting edge computer model developed at North Carolina State University offers detailed insight to predict the environmental impact – along with understanding forest ecosystem response to global climate change. “We think the model will help policy makers and forest ...
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Seasonal exposure of fish to neurotoxic pesticides in an intensive agricultural catchment, Uma‐oya, Sri Lanka: Linking contamination and acetylcholinesterase inhibition
The annual cultivation pattern in the Uma‐oya catchment in Sri Lanka is characterized by Yala and Maha rainfall periods and associated cropping. Two cultivation seasons were compared for pesticide residues: base flow, field drainage, and the runoff and supplementary sediment data for three sites in the catchment. Organophosphate and N‐methyl carbamate pesticide analysis confirmed a higher ...
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Impact of an insecticide changes with amount of leaf litter input: Implications for amphibian populations
Changes in percentage of forest cover can influence nutrient levels in aquatic systems and change abiotic conditions that may influence species. The authors examined how increasing amounts of leaf litter influenced toxicity of the insecticide carbaryl using larval green frogs (Rana clamitans) in outdoor mesocosm ponds. Insecticides can have direct negative effects on individual physiology and ...
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How Much Will it Cost to Save Our Economy’s Foundation?
During the past two summers, Pakistan was hit with catastrophic floods. The record flooding in the late summer of 2010 was the most devastating natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The media coverage reported torrential rains as the cause, but there is much more to the story. When Pakistan was created in 1947, some 30 percent of the landscape was covered by forests. Now it is 4 percent. ...
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Mangroves for Coastal Resilience
Coastal wetlands such as mangrove forests strongly contribute to the safety, food security and income of tens of millions of people throughout the tropics. Wetlands International has helped to restore and conserve thousands of hectares of mangrove forests, closely working with coastal communities. We aim to increase coastal resilience and reduce disaster risk by championing and enabling ...
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Aesthetics & more
When Spanish ex- plorer Sebastian Vizcaino anchored off the windswept white beach and dunes between the Carmel and Monterey bays more than 400 years ago, he could not have envisioned the environmental ebb and flow of the place now called Spanish Bay. There was no 17-Mile Drive, no Asilomar Conference Center, no city of Pacific Grove. He did see a spec- tacular length of beach, offshore rocks ...
By EP Aeration
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Rio Summit may `ignore` forests, warn scientists
Forests have barely been mentioned in the draft of the international agreement to be made at the Rio+20 Earth Summit later this year (20-22 June), the body that represents 15,000 of the world's forest researchers has complained. Forests provide resources essential to the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people, but only one paragraph is devoted to forests in the 'zero draft' — the document that ...
By SciDev.Net
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Indonesia`s moratorium on new forest concessions: Key findings and next steps
The Indonesian moratorium on the award of new licenses in primary natural forests and peat lands, announced in May 2011, is an important step for improving management of forest resources by “pausing” business-as-usual and allowing time to implement reforms. To quantify the moratorium’s coverage, exemptions, encroachments, and additionality (i.e., whether the moratorium extends ...
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The evolving role of tropical forests for local livelihoods in Indonesia
The authors studied how the role and perceptions of natural forests have changed in seven villages along the Malinau River, East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Local people consider development projects, logging and mining activities, and floods as having the greatest influence on their livelihoods and use of forests. Access to and availability of valued forest products is perceived to have ...
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Insights from the field: forests for water
In the Neuse River Basin in North Carolina, WRI is working with partners to identify beneficiaries and their water-related dependencies. We learned that clear documentation of the risks that beneficiaries face from water pollution, drought, and watershed degradation will help jump-start their participation in emerging PWS programs. In the Sebago Lake Watershed in Maine, WRI is finalizing a ...
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Soil water reserve estimation and vegetation relationships in a Mediterranean sub-humid forested catchment
A simple water balance model was used to calculate soil water reserve in a Mediterranean forested catchment. The relationship between soil water reserve and leaf water potential and stem water content was analysed. The usefulness of these variables as plant water status indicators was tested. The analyses were developed with a seven-year-long database (2001–2007) in the case of soil water content ...
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Forests, health and climate change
Forests are essential to our survival and well-being. Forests clean our air, our water, our soil and they regulate our climate, amongst many other things. Trees and forests are not always associated with urban landscapes. However, there too they provide invaluable, often invisible, services. Simply by acting as 'green oasis' in our concrete jungles, they offer recreation and health services for ...
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The changing focus of England?s Community Forest programme and its use of a green infrastructure approach to multi-functional landscape planning
The role of England?s Community Forest programme has constantly diversified since its creation in 1990. Over the last decade, its role has extended from urban foresters to providers of multi-functional and connected spaces around post-industrial cities. The development of such a key role has allowed each community forest to influence the contemporary debates relating to green infrastructure. ...
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How can we create jobs, reduce food prices and boost economies?
The fate of heads of state across the globe is tied in large part to their ability to ensure employment, economic growth, and access to cheap food and clean water. Rising food prices have helped topple dictators across the Middle East. Europe, the United States, Japan and other major economies are spending trillions of dollars to restore growth and jobs. Too often, efforts to address ...
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Gaining Ground: Increasing conservation easements in the U.S. South
A “conservation easement” is a voluntary, legally enforceable land preservation agreement between two parties wherein a landowner sells or donates the development rights to a tract of land to a qualified holding organization, such as a land trust, effectively preventing forest conversion or other stipulated activities, usually in perpetuity. Conservation easements are attractive to ...
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On optimal forest management: a dynamic programming approach
This paper studies optimal any-aged forest management, including uneven-aged and even-aged management as special cases. The approach is based on applying a dynamic programming approach. Dynamic optimisation is applied to study optimal profit-maximising harvesting policies, based on decomposing the forest management problem to smaller subproblems. The optimal harvesting policy implies a ...
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Foresight for European coordination: developing national priorities for the Forest-Based Sector Technology Platform
We explore what implications the geographical dispersion of foresight participants and their regional idiosyncrasies have for the management of foresight processes. Specifically, we argue that these kinds of multi-stakeholder processes place demands such as scalability , modularity and dependability on the design and deployment of foresight methodologies. We also report a Finnish ...
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Assessing agroforestry`s advantages
Agroforestry, the deliberate placement of trees into crop and livestock operations, can help capture substantial amounts of carbon on agricultural lands while providing production and conservation benefits. However, we currently lack tools for accurately estimating current and projected carbon values in these systems. In North America, windbreaks are an effective carbon-capturing option. Only ...
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