Case Study Of Forestry Research Articles

Conservation from the bottom up: A forestry case study

There is currently great interest in increasing the total land area in ‘conservation’ by the year 2030 to stabilize biodiversity and reduce net carbon emissions to combat climate change; however, there remains a lack of clarity on what actually constitutes ‘conservation.’ Land placed into permanent protection from resource utilization falls under the category of land preservation (e.g. National Parks) where land ‘conservation’ can include resource utilization to meet human resource needs. Land ‘preservation’ is an effective means of protecting habitat, but isolation of preserved parcels can limit their effectiveness. The trade-off between land preservation and conservation requires that we consider land use strategies in a global context and as complementary of one another. Most assessments for increasing land conservation are based on vegetative and wildlife inventory, where far fewer assessments are based on soils or belowground accounting. Herein, we present a soil based perspective that could be useful in evaluating the capacity for different land management strategies to meet broader conservation goals, including 30 by 30 and provide a focus on forest management to demonstrate our approach. Our soils-based assessment of different land-use practices suggests that land management practices that cause minimal soil disturbance, generate minimal bare soil, and exhibit a dominance of native species would be effective at achieving meaningful land conservation benefits while continuing to meet human resource needs. Incentivizing conservation oriented land management practices could dramatically accelerate our ability to achieve large scale conservation objectives such as 30 by 30.

Understanding Facilitators and Barriers to Success: Framework for Developing Community Forestry Case Studies

Due to the observed success of community-based management strategies, countries around the world have reformed forest policy to focus upon decentralization and community participation in forest management. Nonetheless, despite the commonly lauded benefits of communal forest management, not all community forest programs successfully achieve the dual goals of forest conservation and income generation. In an era when communal forest management is gaining global popularity, understanding factors that enable or constrain communities’ communal forests and community forest enterprises will help ensure their success. A significant amount of academic research has focused upon identifying and summarizing factors that facilitate or impede community-based resource management. Understanding these factors is an important first step for individuals interested in understanding community forestry operations. The goal of this article is to guide individuals interested in delving deeper into an existing community forestry case. This article provides a framework that can be used to develop community-forestry case studies and guide analysis. The framework highlights the interconnection between community resources, national-scale policy implementation, and markets and provides key factors to consider when analyzing the local context of community-based natural resource management cases.

ENSEMBLING OF DECISION TREES, KNN, AND LOGISTIC REGRESSION WITH SOFT-VOTING METHOD FOR WILDFIRE SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING

Abstract. As a result of climate change, climatic catastrophes, such as wildfires, are likely to increase. Wildfires continue to occur frequently and spread with greater intensity due to extreme weather conditions. In recent years, explosive fire growths have been reported in the United States, Australia, and other parts of the world. A combination of climate change and human activity has caused the semi-arid forestry areas in Iran's northern provinces to become more desiccated, leading to an increase in wildfires. The accuracy of the resulting fire susceptibility maps (FSMs) will directly be related to the performance of the method classifier. In this study, we use an ensemble classifier to model the FSM for a selected forestry case study area in one of the northern provinces of this country. Therefore, FSM is generated based on established criteria using the ensemble model. With Decision Trees, K nearest neighbor, and Logistic Regression, the ensemble model was created using the soft-voting method. A forest fire inventory data is created based on data collected over five years using GPS and the MODIS thermal anomalies product for training and testing the applied approach. The K-fold method was used for validation, and the resulting FSM was validated using five accuracy assessment metrics. The best result from the area under the curve (AUC) yields 93% for fold 9, and the mean AUC for ten folds yields 88%.

System of system design-for-resilience heuristics derived from forestry case study variants

System of Systems connect complex technological systems (e.g. power plants, transportation, and infrastructure) to provide additional services. Failures in one constituent system, however, can often cascade to other systems within the network. Decision makers need repeatable, generalizable System of System design-for-resilience approaches. Current design-for-resilience approaches, however, are often not generalizable, do not fully leverage network structure as a design parameter, and require designers to identify possible faults before they occur. These gaps motivate our research question: How can biologically inspired design be used to increase System of Systems resilience to unexpected link failure? We hypothesize that examining a set of 20 possible design variants for the same case study will reveal correlations between Ecological Network Analysis metrics (a subset of graph theory) and increased resilience. These correlations are then used to identify 13 design-for-resilience heuristics. Heuristics are simplified design guidelines that improve, but do not necessarily optimize, decision making during the design process. This work provides two contributions. First, the heuristics provide an approach to both design for increased resilience and evaluate potential System of Systems designs. A discussion of when the heuristics are applicable is presented (i.e. initial graph theory metric value limitations). Secondly, validation tests provide evidence that the heuristics can be used to increase resilience for networks other than the case study. This article provides a crucial step by utilizing Ecological Network Analysis to identify and test a set of design-for-resilience heuristics, an important step to developing a repeatable, network-based, fault agnostic approach to design Systems of Systems with increased resilience.

Comparison of the ease of use and accuracy of two machine learning algorithms – forestry case study

With the availability of massive amounts of data and cheap computing, machine learning has become increasingly viable to create extensive multivariate mathematical models of natural phenomena to help predict accurate future trends that would have been impossible for humans to accomplish by themselves. There is a wide variety of different machine learning algorithms available, and it is not always known which one will perform best for a given dataset. This can be determined after training and evaluating the different models and comparing them. In this case study, logistic regression and random forest models were compared in terms of accuracy and ease of use. We hypothesized that logistic regression would yield a higher accuracy and be easier to set up in a comparable scenario for a given dataset compared to random forest. Both algorithms used the same forestry dataset to see which one would outperform the other. Initially, logistic regression looked like the better choice, however, after a variety of comparisons, random forest yielded higher performance in both accuracy measurements (accuracy=0.9722, Fbeta=0.9722 for random forest vs. accuracy=0.7141, Fbeta=0.6990 for logistic regression) and did not require as much detailed tuning as logistic regression did.

Amending conservation programs through expanding choice architecture: A case study of forestry and livestock producers

Incentives designed to spur the adoption of agroforestry practices by farmers across the United States have largely been ineffective. Unfortunately, most Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contracts are composed of temporary grassland conversions, not permanent forest land conversions. Using data collected from forestry and livestock producers, we estimate the minimum payment necessary for producers to adopt the agroforestry practice of silvopasture. Results indicate that CRP contracts based on silvopasture or other integrated systems may be a more efficient alternative than contracts based on complete conversion to forest land. However, successful implementation of such a policy requires a well-informed producer base whose behavior can be nudged towards integrated systems.

Decision-Making in Forestry: A Review of the Hybridisation of Multiple Criteria and Group Decision-Making Methods

The degree of complexity in forest management has increased in the last few decades, not only due to the inclusion of specific new issues (e.g., climate change, social protection, etc.), but also because these new, as well as classic, issues have to be dealt with in a context characterised by multiple conflicting criteria that are evaluated by different stakeholders. Nowadays, the multicriteria issue enjoys a relatively sound tradition in forest management. However, the consideration of several stakeholders, which requires the formulation of management models within a collective decision-making setting, is not that advanced. This paper aims to provide a critical overview of forestry case studies that have been published in primary journals and that deal with multiple criteria and several stakeholders. Based on this overview, some highlights of the most promising methods were obtained, and recommendations for the fruitful use of these combined methodologies for dealing with numerous types of forest management problems are provided.

Community Forestry in the State of Uttarakhand, India: Not Meeting the Needs of the Villagers

This community forestry case study examines village forest councils (van panchayat) in India’s northern state of Uttarakhand. We describe forest stocking levels of 20 community forests and address the question of whether these forests are in a position to provide commodity resources, such as fuelwood and fodder, on a sustainable basis. In addition, we report on the perceptions of the villagers on whether their respective community forest is meeting their fuelwood and fodder needs. At the biophysical level, none of the community forests were in a position to provide fuelwood and fodder on a sustainable basis. Most forests did not have adequate overstory stocking, and there was no evidence of deliberate management to improve the situation. Interviews with 400 villagers (20 in each village) supported the field findings. Villagers unanimously reported that their respective community forest was inadequate in supplying commodity needs. Furthermore, they wished the Forest Department would provide more technical and financial assistance to guide them with forest management needs. Women are a critical part of community forestry as they are the primary gatherers of fuelwood and fodder. Although the perceptions of women toward forest management issues are important, our interviews with female villagers indicate they play a passive role in decision-making. Decentralization in natural resources management sounds good at the theoretical level as it provides villagers with some authority and autonomy, but it cannot be effectively implemented without professional guidance coupled with resources. The villagers are ready and willing to improve the situation, but they do not have the resources to make change unilaterally—they need professional and financial support from the Forest Department.

The Role of Trust in Natural Resource Management Conflicts: A Forestry Case Study from Germany

The Role of Trust in Natural Resource Management Conflicts: A Forestry Case Study from Germany

Comparing community forestry actors in Cameroon, Indonesia, Namibia, Nepal and Germany

Current research on community forestry worldwide is starting to question whether community forestry programmes can fulfil their goals towards the empowerment of the local forest user. Apparently, the driving forces behind the programmes are actors who are very powerful within the hierarchies, and devolution of power to the local level is not taking place. Several research efforts have investigated the issue and have identified different internal and external actors as important players.However, said research seldom analyses actor involvement directly, and in addition leaves open the theoretical definition of the term “actor”. The lack of this definition makes impossible the comparison of different findings. If further research intends to compare community forestry worldwide, there is a need for a theory-based actor model.In order to contribute to the general discourse on community forestry, this study has defined the term “actor”, and also introduces an actor classification model that is theory-based. The model, together with an actor identification method, was applied to selected community forestry case studies in five different countries around the world (Indonesia, Germany, Cameroon, Namibia and Nepal). The results provide an answer on the question: who are the main actors involved with community forestry? At the same time, the empirical findings also demonstrate that the model is applicable in practice.

Application of a tri-capital community resilience framework for assessing the social–ecological system sustainability of community-based forest management in the Philippines

This study proposes and empirically tests a framework that integrates the concepts of community resilience and social–ecological system (SES) resilience through community forestry case studies. The framework provides a possible approach for assessing community resilience based on the development and allocation of socio-cultural, economic, and natural capital of individual households within a given forest community. Furthermore, aspects of SES resilience and system dynamics are used to define the potential state thresholds of community resilience. This exploratory attempt to quantify community resilience, using the proposed framework, aims to advance understanding of the conceptual overlaps of SES and community resilience as applied to forestry management. We consider community forestry groups as SES examples in which the community is an important stakeholder in managing natural forest capital. We selected pioneer communities under the community-based forest management (CBFM) Program in the Philippines as our case studies. We found that, on average, CBFM group members demonstrated moderate levels of resilience according to their acquired levels of capital. Although economic capital remained the weakest capital, the CBFM program had a positive effect in increasing the socio-cultural and natural capital of an entire community.

A Study on the Selection Principle of Industrial Clusters based on Industrial Integrated Design Case Study of Forestry

Technical cluster which consists of core technology and relevant matching technology can support or induce a core industry. By integrating the basic conditions and professional integration, it can be pushed up to an integrated industrial cluster, matched to the core industry. Thus a strategic core industry can support or induce an industrial cluster which has organic links. Only if we follow the principles when selecting industrial clusters can the benefits be maximized. In this paper, I take forestry as an example, analysing the application of selection principle on integrating forest resources, as well as its advantages.

Cultural entrenchment: Explaining gaps between ecosystem-based management policy and practice in the forests of Newfoundland

Forests in North America have been managed, or unmanaged, under a number of different policy regimes, most recently ecosystem-based management (EBM), which has emerged in response to perceived widespread ecological degradation. But as policy regimes shift, links between stated objectives and the tools or mechanisms to achieve those objectives need to be forged. This case study of forestry on the island of Newfoundland provides an illustration of the gaps between EBM policy and practice, and insights into why EBM can be difficult to implement. Though the case of Newfoundland is unusual because of its isolation, narrow set of economic options, and weak ENGO sector, its adherence to a traditional timber regime offers lessons for the ways that policies move from agenda setting to implementation. In this case, the role of cultural entrenchment—a commitment to timber-based management and to a provincial model of economic support for large-scale industry—created a negative feedback loop that undermined new policy objectives. But a window of opportunity has emerged as a result of pulp and paper industry decline, and so overcoming cultural entrenchment and building a new forest management regime centered on EBM is possible through clearly articulated policy mechanisms and the integration of new forms of expertise.

Forest cover change and land tenure change in Mexico’s avocado region: Is community forestry related to reduced deforestation for high value crops?

Forest cover change in highland pine-oak forests of Michoacan, Mexico is due to a process of conversion of natural forests to avocado orchards. Privately-owned avocado orchards are found on land that was common forest before the 1992 Reform of the Mexican Constitution. We ask how forest cover change was facilitated by policy changes that affected land tenure rules and existing community forestry programs. We use a comparative case study of four communities, an analysis of forest cover change, and interviews and household surveys. Results show that 33.1% of forest cover was lost over a 16-year-period across the region. However, two forestry case study communities lost 7.2% and 15.1% of forest cover, while two adjacent non-forestry communities lost 86.5% and 92.4%, respectively. Interview data show that the Reform of Article 27 combined with the 1992 Forestry Law led to collapse of local governance, illegal division of common forests, and illegal logging in the two non-forestry communities.

Spatial transferring of ecosystem services and property rights allocation of ecological compensation

Ecological compensation is an important means to maintain the sustainability and stability of ecosystem services. The property rights analysis of ecosystem services is indispensable when we implement ecological compensation. In this paper, ecosystem services are evaluated via spatial transferring and property rights analysis. Take the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) as an example, we attempt to classify the spatial structure of 31 categories of ecosystem services into four dimensions, i.e., local, regional, national and global ones, and divide the property rights structure into three types, i.e., private property rights, common property rights and state-owned property rights. Through the case study of forestry, farming industry, drainage area, development of mineral resources, nature reserves, functional areas, agricultural land expropriation, and international cooperation on ecological compensation, the feasible ecological compensation mechanism is illustrated under the spatial structure and property rights structure of the concerned ecosystem services. For private property rights, the ecological compensation mode mainly depends on the market mechanism. If the initial common property rights are “hidden,” the implementation of ecological compensation mainly relies on the quota market transactions and the state investment under the state-owned property rights, and the fairness of property rights is thereby guaranteed through central administration.

Emmanuel Kreike. Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The Global Consequences of Local Contradictions. Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2010. xviii + 224 pp. Maps. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $88.95 Hardcover. $28.95 Paper.

Emmanuel Kreike. Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The Global Consequences of Local Contradictions. Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2010. xviii + 224 pp. Maps, Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $88.95 Hardcover. $28.95 Paper. In Deforestation and Reforestation, Kreike draws from his earlier work on the socio-environmental history of Ovamboland to confront modern paradigms of environmental change. Modernizationists view Western conservation science and technology, guided by state authority, as mastering world environments and overturning destructive, irrational indigenous natural resource use. Declinists argue that Western science, capitalism, and commodification have disrupted a pristine nature characterized by indigenous people in harmony with their environments, ushering in environmental decline. Inclinists place faith in indigenous knowledge and resource use to solve environmental problems, eschewing alarmist claims about environmental degradation. They all, in Kreike 's view, posit false dichotomies that separate nature from culture, wilderness from civilization, overlooking historical paradoxes that do not fit neatly into any single framework. Kreike offers historical evidence from Ovamboland, a region bisected by the AngolanNamibian border, to argue for a view of environmental change that is nonlinear, and that accepts the reality of historical paradoxes and contradictions in local environments. Despite the title, there are few forests in this book. Yet the forestry case study perhaps best illustrates Kreike 's main argument. Nineteenth-century European explorers, missionaries, and colonial conquerors entered into a floodplain environment between the Cunene and Okavongo rivers that was densely populated and heavily forested, punctuated by Ovambo grain fields and cattle kraals. One hundred years later, Ovamboland was again heavily forested, although not in the same locales or with the same tree species of the previous century, but rather with fruit trees that had accompanied and facilitated Ovambo migration from Angola into Namibia. In the interval, Ovamboland had gone through decades of caused by the influx of refugees, who used trees to build fortified homesteads and fire to clear floodplain and bush lands for grain crops. Over time Ovambo migrants actively and passively propagated indigenous fruit trees, recreating, but not replicating, the dense forest environment of the previous century. This is a familiar argument in recent African forest history. Depending on the point at which evidence is sought, Kreike argues, one will find dramatic deforestation or spectacular reforestation in the same landscape, challenging linear views of environmental change. Other chapters present similar paradoxes. While many histories see colonialism as integrating African societies into modern international commodity networks, Kreike argues that before colonialism began, Ovambo people were already well-integrated into global commodity networks by supplying tens of thousands of cattle to regional and Atlantic markets. …

The design of socially optimal decisions in a consensus scenario

Several situations of conflict between basic social principles can crop up during a consensus searching process. The majority principle and respect for minority groups is a possible example of a conflictive situation between two social principles. In this paper, we outline a specific consensus searching scenario, where individual preferences are expressed by “pairwise” comparison matrices. The set of compromise consensuses between the majority and minority principles is determined using a procedure based upon an adaptation of Yu's p-metric distances. Finally, we use three different theoretical approaches – utility theory, p-metric distance functions and bargaining theory – to obtain the social optimum from the set of compromise consensuses. The links and differences among the three approaches are analysed. Finally, the working of the proposed theoretical framework is illustrated with the help of a forestry case study.

Limitations of Leasehold Forestry for Poverty Alleviation in Nepal

Two leasehold forestry case studies reveal potential limitations in the poverty alleviation potential of Nepal's leasehold forestry program. First, even though the program is targeted toward the poorest, nonpoor households can find opportunities to enter leasehold forest user groups. Second, by not raising the incomes and living standards of all households in a group simultaneously, it is possible for leasehold forestry to simply redistribute poverty. These limitations may be problems of implementation, rather than design. If so, it is important for implementing officials to be cautious when forming leasehold forests.

Supply chain management in forestry––case studies at Södra Cell AB

The use of supply chain management and optimisation is of increasing importance in the forest industry. The overall wood-flow starts with standing trees in forests and continues with harvesting, bucking, sorting, transportation to terminals, sawmills, pulp mills, paper mills and heating plants, conversion into products such as pulp, paper, lumber, and ends at different customers. Many planning problems arise along the chain and these cover different time horizons. Co-ordinating the wood-flow is a vital concern for many companies. We study Södra, one of the larger Swedish forest companies, which is involved in all stages of the wood-flow. We focus in particular on Södra Cell AB, a company within Södra, which is responsible for pulp production. We describe the operations at Södra Cell and the decision support tools used for supply chain planning. We describe five major projects or cases which focus on improving their supply chain management and optimisation. These cases include the introduction of new technologies for sales and orders, new distribution structures using terminals, and the development of integrated optimisation models and methods.

The impact of interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences: a forestry case study

Interdisciplinary research has been identified as a critical means of addressing some of our planet's most urgent environmental problems. Yet relatively little is known about the processes and impacts of interdisciplinary approaches to environmental sciences. This study used citation analysis and ordinary least squares regression to investigate the relationship between an article's citation rate and its degree of interdisciplinarity in one area of environmental science; viz., forestry. Three types of interdisciplinarity were recognized—authorship, subject matter, and cited literature—and each was quantified using Brillouin's diversity index. Data consisted of more than 750 articles published in the journal Forest Science during the 10-year period 1985–1994. The results indicate that borrowing was the most influential method of interdisciplinary information transfer. Articles that drew information from a diverse set of journals were cited with greater frequency than articles having smaller or more narrowly focused bibliographies. This finding provides empirical evidence that interdisciplinary methods have made a measurable and positive impact on the forestry literature.