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A Simple Planting Technique for Re-establishing Trees Where Frequent Inundation Occurs
Published on: January 26, 2018
Increasing human dominance of tropical forests
Simon L Lewis1, David P Edwards2, David Galbraith3
1Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK. School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. s.l.lewis@leeds.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Tropical forests house over half of Earth's biodiversity and are an important influence on the climate system. These forests are experiencing escalating human influence, altering their health and the provision of important ecosystem functions and services. Impacts started with hunting and millennia-old megafaunal extinctions (phase I), continuing via low-intensity shifting cultivation (phase II), to today's global integration, dominated by intensive permanent agriculture, industrial logging, and attendant fires and fragmentation (phase III). Such ongoing pressures, together with an intensification of global environmental change, may severely degrade forests in the future (phase IV, global simplification) unless new "development without destruction" pathways are established alongside climate change-resilient landscape designs.
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