Land cover change interacts with drought severity to change fire regimes in Western Amazonia.

Fire is becoming a pervasive driver of environmental change in Amazonia and is expected to intensify, given projected reductions in precipitation and forest cover. Understanding of the influence of post-deforestation land cover change on fires in Amazonia is limited, even though fires in cleared lands constitute a threat for ecosystems, agriculture, and human health. We used MODIS satellite data to map burned areas annually between 2001 and 2010.

Depopulation of rural landscapes exacerbates fire activity in the western Amazon.

Destructive fires in Amazonia have occurred in the past decade, leading to forest degradation, carbon emissions, impaired air quality, and property damage. Here, we couple climate, geospatial, and province-level census data, with farmer surveys to examine the climatic, demographic, and land use factors associated with fire frequency in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010. Although our results corroborate previous findings elsewhere that drought and proximity to roads increase fire frequency, the province-scale analysis further identifies decreases in rural populations as an additional factor.

Carbon outcomes of major land-cover transitions in SE Asia: great uncertainties and REDD+ policy implications.

Policy makers across the tropics propose that carbon finance could provide incentives for forest frontier communities to transition away from swidden agriculture (slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation) to other systems that potentially reduce emissions and/or increase carbon sequestration. However, there is little certainty regarding the carbon outcomes of many key land-use transitions at the center of current policy debates. Our meta-analysis of over 250 studies reporting above- and below-ground carbon estimates for different land-use types indicates great uncertainty in the net total ecosystem carbon changes that can be expected from many transitions, including the replacement of various types of swidden agriculture with oil palm, rubber, or some other types of agroforestry systems.

Managing the megacity for global sustainability: the new york metropolitan region as an urban biosphere reserve.

The UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR), while not originally conceived to include urban areas, was intended to include sites representing all significant ecosystems with the goal of support for sustainable development locally and globally. Drawing on the example of the New York Metropolitan Region (NYMR), which has a population of 21.4 million, it is argued here that the eventual inclusion of the largest of the world's cities in WNBR not only is within the logic of the biosphere reserve concept, but would also benefit the network and its goals.