When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-016-0772-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Related collections

Most cited references 41

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation

HELMUT J. GEIST, Eric Lambin (2002)

0 comments Cited 613 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Ten principles for a landscape approach to reconciling agriculture, conservation, and other competing land uses.

Jeffrey A Sayer, Terry Sunderland, Jaboury Ghazoul … (2013)

"Landscape approaches" seek to provide tools and concepts for allocating and managing land to achieve social, economic, and environmental objectives in areas where agriculture, mining, and other productive land uses compete with environmental and biodiversity goals. Here we synthesize the current consensus on landscape approaches. This is based on published literature and a consensus-building process to define good practice and is validated by a survey of practitioners. We find the landscape approach has been refined in response to increasing societal concerns about environment and development tradeoffs. Notably, there has been a shift from conservation-orientated perspectives toward increasing integration of poverty alleviation goals. We provide 10 summary principles to support implementation of a landscape approach as it is currently interpreted. These principles emphasize adaptive management, stakeholder involvement, and multiple objectives. Various constraints are recognized, with institutional and governance concerns identified as the most severe obstacles to implementation. We discuss how these principles differ from more traditional sectoral and project-based approaches. Although no panacea, we see few alternatives that are likely to address landscape challenges more effectively than an approach circumscribed by the principles outlined here.

0 comments Cited 282 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

The efficiency of payments for environmental services in tropical conservation.

Sven Wunder (2007)

Payments for environmental services (PES) represent a new, more direct way to promote conservation. They explicitly recognize the need to address difficult trade-offs by bridging the interests of landowners and external actors through compensations. Theoretical assessments praise the advantages of PES over indirect approaches, but in the tropics PES application has remained incipient. Here I aim to demystify PES and clarify its scope for application as a tool for tropical conservation. I focus on the supply side of PES (i.e., how to convert PES funding into effective conservation on the ground), which until now has been widely neglected. I reviewed the PES literature for developing countries and combined these findings with observations from my own field studies in Latin America and Asia. A PES scheme, simply stated, is a voluntary, conditional agreement between at least one "seller" and one "buyer" over a well-defined environmental service--or a land use presumed to produce that service. Major obstacles to effective PES include demand-side limitations and a lack of supply-side know-how regarding implementation. The design of PES programs can be improved by explicitly outlining baselines, calculating conservation opportunity costs, customizing payment modalities, and targeting agents with credible land claims and threats to conservation. Expansion of PES can occur if schemes can demonstrate clear additionality (i.e., incremental conservation effects vis-à-vis predefined baselines), if PES recipients' livelihood dynamics are better understood, and if efficiency goals are balanced with considerations of fairness. PES are arguably best suited to scenarios of moderate conservation opportunity costs on marginal lands and in settings with emerging, not-yet realized threats. Actors who represent credible threats to the environment will more likely receive PES than those already living in harmony with nature. A PES scheme can thus benefit both buyers and sellers while improving the resource base, but it is unlikely to fully replace other conservation instruments.

0 comments Cited 175 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Contributors

Robin L. Chazdon: +1-860-486-4057 , robin.chazdon@uconn.edu

Bio :

Robin L. Chazdon

is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut and Senior Research Associate at the International Institute of Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research focuses on the ecology, dynamics, regeneration, and restoration of tropical forests and landscapes. She is the Director of the People and Reforestation in the Tropical Research Coordination Network (PARTNERS) and Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation.

Pedro H. S. Brancalion: pedrob@usp.br

Bio :

Pedro H. S. Brancalion

is professor of tropical forestry in the Department of Forest Sciences, “Luiz de Queiroz” College of Agriculture, University of São Paulo. His main research interest is tropical forest restoration in human-modified landscapes, including issues related to the ecology of regeneration, environmental governance, ecosystem services, and commercial production of native species.

Lars Laestadius: lars.h.laestadius@gmail.com

Bio :

Lars Laestadius

is an independent consultant. During more than 17 years as a Senior Associate in the Forests Program of the World Resources Institute (WRI), he led the work of Global Forest Watch Russia to define and map intact forest landscapes, developing a method that has since been applied worldwide. He also led the creation of the Forest Legality Alliance, a business-NGO partnership to reduce the cost of keeping illegal wood out of supply chains, and an initiative to define and map global opportunities for restoration of forests and landscapes. Before joining WRI, he spent 3 years in the European Commission leading the efforts of the COST program to coordinate nationally funded research on forests and forest products across Europe, and did research on forestry operations in Sweden and the USA. He has a forestry degree from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a PhD in wood supply systems from Virginia Tech in USA.

Aoife Bennett-Curry: aoife.bennett@gmail.com , aoife.bennett-curry@ouce.ox.ac.uk

Bio :

Aoife Bennett-Curry

is an Oxford University doctoral student who is conducting her research in collaboration with CIFOR-Peru. Her research has an interdisciplinary approach, which merges social and natural sciences. She is interested in finding opportunities for forest conservation, restoration, and regrowth in a developing agricultural landscape in the Peruvian Amazon.

Kathleen Buckingham: kbuckingham@wri.org , kathleenbuckingham@gmail.com

Bio :

Kathleen Buckingham

is a Research Associate with the Global Restoration Initiative at the World Resources Institute based in Washington D.C. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford.

Chetan Kumar: chetan.kumar@iucn.org

Bio :

Chetan Kumar

is Manager, Landscape Restoration Science and Knowledge with International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). His work focuses on enhancing science–policy links on forest and landscape restoration.

Julian Moll-Rocek: Jmollrocek@post.harvard.edu

Bio :

Julian Moll-Rocek

is research and communications coordinator with Wild Forests and Fauna—WFF, and worked as the outreach coordinator for People and Reforestation in the Tropics Research Coordination Network (PARTNERS).

Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira: ima@museu-goeldi.br

Bio :

Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira

is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Botany at Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi/MCTI. Her main research interests are forest ecology and restoration and land use change in the Amazon region.

Sarah Jane Wilson: sjwil@umich.edu

Bio :

Sarah Jane Wilson

is a postdoctoral researcher with International Forestry Resources and Institutions at the University of Michigan, having recently completed a PhD in Geography on community-based cloud forest restoration in Andean Ecuador. She researches why individuals and communities choose to restore and conserve tropical forests, and the impacts of these actions on forest and landscape ecology, and on people’s lives and livelihoods.

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Ambio

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Ambio

Title: Ambio

Publisher: Springer Netherlands (Dordrecht )

ISSN (Print): 0044-7447

ISSN (Electronic): 1654-7209

Publication date (Electronic): 9 March 2016

Publication date PMC-release: 9 March 2016

Publication date (Print): September 2016

Volume: 45

Issue: 5

Pages: 538-550

Affiliations

[1 ]University of Connecticut, 75 North Eagleville Road, Unit 3043, Storrs, CT 06269-3042 USA

[2 ]Universidade de São Paulo/ESALQ, Av. Pádua Dias 11, Piracicaba, SP 13418-900 Brazil

[3 ]World Resources Institute, 10G Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 USA

[4 ]School of Geography and the Environment, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY UK

[5 ]CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia

[6 ]International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 1630 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20009 USA

[7 ]Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, CP 399, Belém, PA CEP 66060-310 Brazil

[8 ]IFRI, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48105 USA

[9 ]11407 Symphony Woods Lane, Silver Spring, MD 20901 USA

[10 ]3298 Greenwood Heights Drive, Kneeland, CA 95549 USA

Article

Publisher ID: 772

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-016-0772-y

PMC ID: 4980317

PubMed ID: 26961011

SO-VID: dec9d4aa-f937-4bb6-b01a-e896407c0319

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

History

Date received : 11 November 2015

Date revision received : 4 February 2016

Date accepted : 18 February 2016

Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;

Award ID: DEB-1313788

Award Recipient : Robin L. Chazdon

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology

Keywords: deforestation,forest assessment,forest management,landscape,plantation,reforestation,restoration

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology

Keywords: deforestation, forest assessment, forest management, landscape, plantation, reforestation, restoration

When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration

Read this article at

Abstract

Electronic supplementary material

Related collections

UCL: UN SDG 15 Life on Land

Most cited references 41

Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation

Ten principles for a landscape approach to reconciling agriculture, conservation, and other competing land uses.

The efficiency of payments for environmental services in tropical conservation.

Author and article information

Contributors

Journal

Affiliations

Article

History

Funding

Categories

Custom metadata

Comments

Comment on this article

Similar content 15

Cited by 106

Most referenced authors 835