Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 30, 2026
03:42
Continuous In-woods Production of Biochar Using a Trailer-Mounted Air Curtain Burner
Published on: April 5, 2024
Effectiveness of strict vs. multiple use protected areas in reducing tropical forest fires: a global analysis using
Andrew Nelson1, Kenneth M Chomitz
1International Rice Research Institute, Metro Manila, Philippines.
Plos One
|August 23, 2011
Summary
Protected areas effectively reduce deforestation, especially indigenous and multi-use areas. These conservation strategies support biodiversity, CO2 mitigation, and local livelihoods.
Area of Science:
- Environmental Science
- Conservation Biology
- Forestry
Background:
- Protected areas (PAs) are crucial for tropical forest conservation, covering a quarter of the global estate.
- Effectiveness of PAs in reducing deforestation is debated, particularly when local communities have forest usage rights.
- A significant analytical challenge is the non-random placement of PAs on marginal lands, biasing comparisons with unprotected areas.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the effectiveness of different types of protected areas (strict, multi-use, indigenous) in reducing deforestation across the global tropical forest biome.
- To address analytical biases by employing matching techniques to control for land marginality and deforestation pressure.
- To investigate the impact of remoteness as a proxy for deforestation pressure on PA effectiveness.
Main Methods:
- Utilized forest fires as a high-resolution proxy for deforestation across a 1 km map of tropical forests (2000).
- Employed matching techniques to compare pre-2000 PAs with randomly selected, never-protected points, controlling for factors like distance to roads/cities, elevation, slope, and rainfall.
- Disaggregated analysis by remoteness to assess varying deforestation pressures.
Main Results:
- Strict PAs significantly reduced fire incidence in Latin America and Asia; multi-use PAs were even more effective.
- Indigenous areas in Latin America reduced forest fire incidence by 16 percentage points, outperforming naive comparisons.
- In Africa, recently established strict PAs showed effectiveness, but multi-use PA impacts were not robustly estimated due to limited data.
Conclusions:
- Forest protection, particularly through indigenous and multi-use PAs, is effective in reducing deforestation and forest fires.
- These findings support the integration of PAs into global conservation and climate change mitigation strategies, such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).
- Indigenous and multi-use PAs demonstrate compatibility between global environmental goals and the support of local livelihoods.
Related Concept Videos
02:31Habitat Fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation describes the division of a more extensive, continuous habitat into smaller, discontinuous areas. Human activities such as land conversion, as well as slower geological processes leading to changes in the physical environment, are the two leading causes of habitat fragmentation. The fragmentation process typically follows the same steps: perforation, dissection, fragmentation, shrinkage, and attrition.
01:19Survival Tree
Survival trees are a non-parametric method used in survival analysis to model the relationship between a set of covariates and the time until an event of interest occurs, often referred to as the "time-to-event" or "survival time." This method is particularly useful when dealing with censored data, where the event has not occurred for some individuals by the end of the study period, or when the exact time of the event is unknown.
Building a Survival Tree
Constructing a survival tree begins...
Building a Survival Tree
Constructing a survival tree begins...
01:25Strategies for Assessing and Addressing Confounding
Confounding is a critical issue in epidemiological studies, often leading to misleading conclusions about associations between exposures and outcomes. It occurs when the relationship between the exposure and the outcome is mixed with the effects of other factors that influence the outcome. Given that, addressing confounding is of high importance for drawing accurate inferences in research.
Confounding can be addressed at both the design phase of a study and through analytical methods after data...
Confounding can be addressed at both the design phase of a study and through analytical methods after data...
01:57Adaptations that Reduce Water Loss
Though evaporation from plant leaves drives transpiration, it also results in loss of water. Because water is critical for photosynthetic reactions and other cellular processes, evolutionary pressures on plants in different environments have driven the acquisition of adaptations that reduce water loss.
01:20Comparing the Survival Analysis of Two or More Groups
Survival analysis is a cornerstone of medical research, used to evaluate the time until an event of interest occurs, such as death, disease recurrence, or recovery. Unlike standard statistical methods, survival analysis is particularly adept at handling censored data—instances where the event has not occurred for some participants by the end of the study or remains unobserved. To address these unique challenges, specialized techniques like the Kaplan-Meier estimator, log-rank test, and Cox...
01:50Threats to Biodiversity
There have been five major extinction events throughout geological history, resulting in the elimination of biodiversity, followed by a rebound of species that adapted to the new conditions. In the current geological epoch, the Holocene, there is a sixth extinction event in progress. This mass extinction has been attributed to human activities and is thus provisionally called the Anthropocene. In 2019 the human population reached 7.7 billion people and is projected to comprise 10 billion by...