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Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

Both hydropower dams and global warming pose threats to freshwater fish diversity. While the extent of global warming may be reduced by a shift towards energy generation by large dams in order to reduce fossil-fuel use, such dams profoundly modify riverine habitats. Furthermore, the threats posed by dams and global warming will interact: for...

This study provides a computationally-simple method to annually update existing national forest maps and model future forest change. It involves integrating national forest maps and global tree cover maps to monitor annual forest change, and then modeling future change by linear extrapolation of the historical trend.

Biofuels are often presented as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, however, empirical analysis that is widely reported in the literature shows that biofuel production can have negative environmental and social impacts. The potential for these negative impacts can be avoided through careful planning of biofuel feedstock...

A new method was developed for mapping forest, agricultural, and urban land cover using remote sensing imagery. It is designed to better detect small land cover objects (e.g. small forest or agricultural patches) and monitor their change (e.g. fine-scale deforestation) using freely-available satellite imagery.

This study evaluated the effects of image pansharpening on Vegetation Indices (VIs) in an agricultural area of Thailand, and found that pansharpening was able to downscale single-date and multi-temporal VI data without introducing significant distortions. The downscaled (15m resolution) VI values can be used for estimating above-ground biomass...

先進国を中心とする木材需要の高まりに応じて、人工林の総面積は過去20年で10倍に拡大した。荒廃地等における人工林の増加は、天然林に対する伐採圧力を緩和し、気候変動の抑制、住民の生計への支援、国家の開発政策への寄与など、極めて重要な役割を担っている。 現在、世界の人工林の60％以上はアジアに存在している。近年におけるアジアの人工林面積の急激な拡大は、特に中国、ベトナム、インドなどにおいて大規模な造林プログラムが実施されてきた結果である。しかし、農村地帯における企業又は政府主導の人工造林は、地域住民を彼らの生活の重要な基盤となっている土地から排除する結果となることが多く、しばしば地域の社会紛争を引き起こしてきた。造林プログラムに地域住民が参加している場合でも、土地利用が制限されるため...