Forest Land Use Change Research Articles

The use of forests for the purpose of tourism: the case of Belek Tourism Center in Turkey

The main aim of this article is to examine and review the usage of forests for the purpose of tourism in Turkey with the case study of Antalya-Belek. The use and conversion of forest lands is central to tourism development. Land use change is responsible for the majority of the negative environmental impacts of tourism on natural resources. Worldwide, forests and coastal zones are converted for the construction of tourist facilities. The rapid emergence of mass tourism development in Turkey, encouraged without considering protection and sustainable use of natural and cultural resources, has resulted in serious problems in forest areas. This paper is particularly concerned with land use change in forests (or deforestation) created by the allocation of forest lands to build tourist facilities. In Belek, a tourism center located in Antalya province's coastal areas and the fastest growing destination of the country, all tourist facilities have been established in forest lands under the status of conservation forest. Today, the Belek Conservation Forest is under severe pressure from tourism.

Unexpected changes in soil phosphorus dynamics along pasture chronosequences in the humid tropics

Phosphorus (P) is widely believed to limit plant growth and organic matter storage in a large fraction of the world's lowland tropical rain forests. We investigated how the most common land use change in such forests, conversion to cattle pasture, affects soil P fractions along pasture chronosequences in the central Brazilian Amazon and in southwestern Costa Rica. Our sites represent a broad range in rainfall, soil type, management strategies, and total soil P (45.2–1228.0 μg P/g soil), yet we found some unexpected and at times quite similar changes in soil P in all sites. In the Brazilian sites, where rainfall is relatively low and pasture management is more intense than in the Costa Rican sites, significant losses in total soil P and soil organic carbon (SOC) were seen with pasture age on already P‐deficient Oxisol and Entisol soils. However, P losses were from inorganic soil P fractions, while organic forms of soil P remained constant or increased with pasture age, despite the declines in SOC. In Costa Rica, SOC remained constant across the Oxisol sites and increased from forest to pasture on the Mollisols, while soil organic P increased with pasture age in both sequences.

Forest Land Conversion Over Time: Implications for the Faustmann Formula

Abstract The Faustmann timber production model has been used to examine the allocation of land between alternative forest land use options. This article provides a clarification and extension of this previous work. We use the basic forest land use options model to allow for the changes in forestland use over time. First, we modify Faustmann's original assumptions to allow for a one-off change in prices or an initial allocation constraint, and examine the forest land manager's decision to switch to an alternative land use at some point in the future. Second, we look at the case where prices evolve over time and it is optimal for the forest land manager to switch between land uses on an equilibrium path. This second extension provides a new application of the Faustmann timber production model. We discuss the theoretical insights and the implications for forest conversion. FOR. SCI. 47(4):510–519.

Simulating the impact of human land use change on forest composition in the Great Plains agroecosystems with the Seedscape model

The expansion and contraction of marginal cropland in the Great Plains often involves small forested strips of land that provide important ecological benefits. The effect of human disturbance on these forests is not well known. Because of their unique structure such forests are not well-represented by forest gap models. In this paper, the development, testing and application of a new model known as Seedscape are described. Seedscape is a modification of the JABOWA-II model, and it uses a spatially-explicit landscape to resolve small-scale features of highly fragmented forests in the eastern Great Plains. It was tested and evaluated with observations from two sites, one in Nebraska and a second in eastern Iowa. Seedscape realistically simulates succession at the Nebraska site, but is less successful at the Iowa site. Seedscape was also applied to the Nebraska site to simulate the effect that varying forest corridor widths, in response to the presumed expansion/contraction of adjacent agricultural land, has on succession properties. Results suggest that small differences in widths have negligible effects on forest composition, but large differences in widths may cause statistically-significant changes in the relative importance of some species. We assert that long-term ecological change in human dominated landscapes is not well understood, in part, because of inadequate modeling techniques. Seedscape provides a much-needed tool for assessing the ecological implications of land use change in forests of predominately agricultural landscapes.

A landscape level comparison of pre-European settlement and current soil carbon content of a forested landscape in upper Michigan

A large forested landscape (18 640 ha) located in Michigan's central Upper Peninsula was examined to estimate current and pre-European mineral soil carbon (C) content. Utilizing current forest stand information and pre-European settlement forest data, a landscape level soil C estimate was made for each time period and the change in soil C over the 150-year interval was quantified. Soil, forest type, and age class information were entered into a geographical information system (GIS); high medium, and low C levels were assigned to soils based on forest type and age class groupings. Using organic matter data from soil surveys of the area, a range of mineral soil C values was determined for each soil mapping unit and vegetation combination, and a percent C value was estimated based on previously assigned C levels. Estimates of average percent C were calculated for both current and pre-European landscapes to be 9.7% and 11.7%, respectively. Overall, there appears to be a decrease in soil C content since European settlement as a result of changes in forest cover and land use. Due to the strong relationship between forest type and soil C content, an increase of urban/brush areas, and a shift from hemlock and conifer forest types to hardwoods and mixed pine/hardwood forests since European settlement, there has been a reduction of the average landscape level soil C on a g/m 2 basis. The net reduction in mineral soil C content on this landscape is estimated to be approximately 0.3 to 0.8 Tg C (in the upper 10–25 cm of mineral soil) over the 150 years since European settlement of the area.

Land-Use History as Long-Term Broad-Scale Disturbance: Regional Forest Dynamics in Central New England

Human land-use activities differ from natural disturbance processes and may elicit novel biotic responses and disrupt existing biotic-environmental relationships. The widespread prevalence of land use requires that human activity be addressed as a fundamental ecological process and that lessons from investigations of land-use history be applied to landscape conservation and management. Changes in the intensity of land use and extent of forest cover in New England over the past 3 centuries provide the opportunity to evaluate the nature of forest response and reorganization to such broad-scale disturbance. Using a range of archival data and modern studies, we assessed historical changes in forest vegetation and land use from the Colonial period (early 17th century) to the present across a 5000 km2 area in central Massachusetts in order to evaluate the effects of this novel disturbance regime on the structure, composition, and pattern of vegetation and its relationship to regional climatic gradients. At the time of European settlement, the distribution of tree taxa and forest assemblages showed pronounced regional variation and corresponded strongly to climate gradients, especially variation in growing degree days. The dominance of hemlock and northern hardwoods (maple, beech, and birch) in the cooler Central Uplands and oak and hickory at lower elevations in the Connecticut Valley and Eastern Lowlands is consistent with the regional distribution of these taxa and suggests a strong climatic control over broad-scale vegetation patterns. We infer from historical and paleoecological data that intensive natural or aboriginal disturbance was minimal in the Uplands, whereas infrequent surface fires in the Lowlands may have helped to maintain the abundance of central hardwoods and to restrict the abundance of hemlock, beech, and sugar maple in these areas. The modern vegetation is compositionally distinct from Colonial vegetation, exhibits less regional variation in the distribution of tree taxa or forest assemblages defined by tree taxa, and shows little relationship to broad climatic gradients. The homogenization of the vegetation, disruption of vegetation-environment relationships, and formation of new assemblages appear to be the result of (a) a massive, novel disturbance regime; (b) ongoing low-intensity human and natural disturbance throughout the reforestation period to the present; (c) permanent changes in some aspects of the biotic and abiotic environment; and (d) a relatively short period for forest recovery (100–150 years). These factors have maintained the regional abundance of shade intolerant and moderately tolerant taxa (for example, birch, red maple, oak, and pine) and restricted the spread and increase of shade-tolerant, long-lived taxa such as hemlock and beech. These results raise the possibility that historical land use has similarly altered vegetation-environment relationships across broader geographic regions and should be considered in all contemporary studies of global change.

奈良県曾爾村における林野所有と林野利用の変容過程

奈良県曾爾村における林野所有と林野利用の変容過程

Land base models for forest resource supply analysis: a critical review

Land base models in regional forest resource supply analyses project area changes in forest vegetation and land use. Models of forest vegetation dynamics are classified according to the basic modeling unit (canopy gap and forest); land use dynamics models are classified according to technique (inventory–descriptive, normative, and positive). Relationships among models used in analyzing timber supply are reviewed, including necessary links between models of forest vegetation dynamics and land use dynamics.