Publications by authors named "Louise P Chini"
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how human activities, particularly forestry and land-use changes, have transformed temperate and boreal forests, affecting their age structure and ecological dynamics.
- It utilizes an empirical model based on 77 protected forest landscapes to estimate how these forests would function without human interference, highlighting a significant reduction in natural disturbance intervals.
- Results indicate that human actions have led to younger forests and decreased carbon turnover rates, which disrupt the natural balance of these ecosystems.
Phosphorus (P) availability in soils limits crop yields in many regions of the World, while excess of soil P triggers aquatic eutrophication in other regions. Numerous processes drive the global spatial distribution of P in agricultural soils, but their relative roles remain unclear. Here, we combined several global data sets describing these drivers with a soil P dynamics model to simulate the distribution of P in agricultural soils and to assess the contributions of the different drivers at the global scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous species have been pushed into extinction as an increasing portion of Earth's land surface has been appropriated for human enterprise. In the future, global biodiversity will be affected by both climate change and land-use change, the latter of which is currently the primary driver of species extinctions. How societies address climate change will critically affect biodiversity because climate-change mitigation policies will reduce direct climate-change impacts; however, these policies will influence land-use decisions, which could have negative impacts on habitat for a substantial number of species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLand-use change to meet 21st-century demands for food, fuel, and fiber will depend on many interactive factors, including global policies limiting anthropogenic climate change and realized improvements in agricultural productivity. Climate-change mitigation policies will alter the decision-making environment for land management, and changes in agricultural productivity will influence cultivated land expansion. We explore to what extent future increases in agricultural productivity might offset conversion of tropical forest lands to crop lands under a climate mitigation policy and a contrasting no-policy scenario in a global integrated assessment model.
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