Christine B. Schmitt

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at University of Passau

Aim: We test the hypothesis that wind dispersal is more common among emergent tree species given that being tall increases the likelihood of effective seed dispersal. Location: Americas, Africa and the Asia-Pacific. Time period: 1970–2020. Major taxa studied: Gymnosperms and Angiosperms. Methods: We used a dataset consisting of tree inventories f...

Bedrohungsszenarien für den Bevölkerungsschutz in Deutschland aus physisch-geographischer Perspektive - Schwerpunkt Hydrologische Ereignisse

Aim: We test the hypothesis that wind dispersal is more common among emergent tree species given that being tall increases the likelihood of effective seed dispersal. Location: Americas, Africa and the Asia-Pacific. Time period: 1970–2020. Major taxa studied: Gymnosperms and Angiosperms. Methods: We used a dataset consisting of tree inventories fro...

Agricultural expansion is the main driver of deforestation in Myanmar. We analyzed the effectiveness of a national policy intervention on agricultural encroachment in state forests in Taungoo District in Myanmar from 2010 to 2020. The policy aims to stop agricultural encroachment and reforest encroached areas through farmers’ participation in an ag...

Wild edible plants (WEPs) can provide diverse and nutrient-rich food sources that contribute to the health and well-being of communities worldwide. In northwestern Kenya, WEPs are vital dietary components for nomadic pastoral communities with limited access to diverse cultivated food crops. However, the increasing impact of climate change poses a t...

Brazilian moist forests and savannas are some of the most species-rich biomes in the Neotropics. In the transition zones between these regions, ecotones often accumulate even higher taxonomic diversity. However, whether these ecotonal communities consist of overlapping species widespread from the neighbouring biomes or a specific set of locally ada...

Key message The Forest Department strongly influences agroforestry design, tree species selection, and the participation and motivation of farmers to plant trees. Farmers perceive trees as harmful to crops and have avoided planting them near crops. We recommend considering farmers’ preferences, establishing farmers’ field schools, and increasing th...

Land-use change remains the main threat to tropical forests and their dependent fauna and flora, and degradation of existing forest remnants will further accelerate species loss. Forest degradation may result directly from human forest use or through spatial effects of land-use change. Understanding the drivers of forest degradation and its effects...

Background Understanding how local communities perceive threats and management options of wild edible plants (WEPs) is essential in developing their conservation strategies and action plans. Due to their multiple use values, including nutrition, medicinal, construction, and cultural as well as biotic and abiotic pressures, WEPs are exposed to overe...

Availability is a crucial aspect of wild edible plants (WEPs) consumption by indigenous communities. Understanding the local perception of this availability helps to determine, which contribution WEPs can make to rural communities. We used an integrated participatory approach to investigate important parameters and themes that influenced the percep...

The world is witnessing an increase in environmental conflicts (ECs) caused by the overexploitation and pollution of natural resources. We argue that addressing the unsustainable and vicious cycle of most contemporary human-nature interactions fuelling these conflicts requires a shift towards inter- and transdisciplinary research. Through critical...

Understanding leaf litter decomposition dynamics is imperative owing to nutrient release rates and synchronization. The emphasis is to sustainably manage agroforestry system and ensure environmental integrity. Therefore, this study aimed at determining the decomposition and nutrient release of leaves of different bamboo species (Oxytenanthera abyss...

The European Union aims to increase the extent of strictly protected areas, including wilderness areas. However, operationalizing this goal in densely populated Central European member states like Germany, that consists almost entirely of cultural landscapes and will need to rely largely on secondary wilderness areas, is challenging. Anthropogenic...

Tropical forests store 40-50% of terrestrial vegetation carbon. Spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests. Because of climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane compared to lowland forests. Here we ass...

Tropical forests store 40–50 per cent of terrestrial vegetation carbon1. However, spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests2. Owing to climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation3, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane forests compared with...

The idea that tropical forest and savanna are alternative states is crucial to how we manage these biomes and predict their future under global change. Large-scale empirical evidence for alternative stable states is limited, however, and comes mostly from the multimodal distribution of structural aspects of vegetation. These approaches have been cr...

11 Natural disturbances are largely suppressed in Central European landscapes due to economic and human safety 12 concerns. European goals to increase the extent of secondary wilderness areas have the potential to support the 13 restoration of threatened habitats associated with natural disturbances. Germany is among the Central European 14 countri...

Natural disturbances are largely suppressed in Central European landscapes due to economic and human safety concerns. European goals to increase the extent of secondary wilderness areas have the potential to support the restoration of threatened habitats associated with natural disturbances. Germany is among the Central European countries with the...

The success of nature conservation strongly depends on the attitudes and awareness of people, as well as on the level of poverty, land scarcity, communication gaps, and governance structures. In this commentary we elaborate potential effects of inter-community differences on peoples´ attitudes towards nature conservation and the role of land manage...

Significance We develop a biogeographic approach to analyzing the presence of alternative stable states in tropical biomes. Whilst forest–savanna bistability has been widely hypothesized and modeled, empirical evidence has remained scarce and controversial, and here, applying our method to Africa, we provide large-scale evidence that there are alte...

In the quest to promote bamboo agroforestry in the dry semi-deciduous forest zone of Ghana, we evaluated changes in soil properties, crop productivity and the economic potential of a bamboo-based intercropping system. The intercropping system was established from 3-months old sympodial bamboo (Bambusa balcooa) seedlings planted at a 5 m × 5 m spaci...

Aim Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and...

Aim: Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) an...

To promote bamboo use for charcoal production, environmental impacts and financial profitability of producing 1 MJ energy of charcoal from bamboo - Bambusa balcooa in comparison with two commonly used local species - Anogeissus leiocarpus and Senna siamea were analyzed. Environmental impacts were assessed using the life cycle analytical (LCA) appro...

In the quest to promote bamboo agro-forestry in the dry semi-deciduous forest zone of Ghana, we evaluated changes in soil properties, crop productivity and the economic potential of a bamboo-based intercropping system. The intercropping system was established from 3-months old sympodial bamboo (Bambusa balcooa) seedlings planted at a 5 m95 m spacin...

One would not have expected a vicious virus causing a respiratory disease to discriminate in its life-threatening passage. Yet, according to conventional wisdom, inequalities are revealed when disaster or crisis strike. Moreover, misfortunes do not happen in a social vacuum, but find different expressions in specific contexts and groups of people....

The bioeconomy concept has the aim of adding sustainability to the production, transformation and trade of biological goods. Though taken up throughout the world, the development of national bioeconomies is uneven, especially in the global South, where major challenges exist in Sub-Saharan Africa with respect to implementation. This special issue...

The bioeconomy concept has the aim of adding sustainability to the production, transformation and trade of biological goods. Though taken up throughout the world, the development of national bioeconomies is uneven, especially in the global South, where major challenges exist in Sub-Saharan Africa with respect to implementation. The BiomassWeb proje...

Habitat destruction and deterioration are amongst the main drivers of biodiversity loss. Increasing demand for agricultural products, timber and charcoal has caused the rapid destruction of natural forests, especially in the tropics. The Taita Hills in southern Kenya are part of the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Hotspot and represent a highly di...

Workshop report - Strategies for ecosystem and species conservation: Exploring lessons learnt from Australia and Africa, Charles Darwin University (CDU), Australia, 18-22 November 2019

Bastin et al .’s estimate (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon is approximately five times too large. Their analysis inflated soil organic carbon gains, failed to safeguard against warming from trees at high latitudes and elevations, and considered afforestation of s...

Developing countries that implement the Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are required to ensure the effective participation of all stakeholders including indigenous peoples and local communities. Community-based monitoring (CBM) of REDD+ pr...

African mountains vary considerably in their geological age and origin, size, spatial isolation and climate. These differences affect the floristic composition of Tropical Mountain Forests (TMFs) in Africa, which harbor high levels of endemism both at mountain resolution and across groups of mountains. TMFs are under threat from human activities, a...

Forest degradation is an environmental problem that falls in the domains of different disciplines. Therefore, it is necessary to tackle this issue from a multidisciplinary perspective to support the design of appropriate forest monitoring systems and policies. The overall goal of this study was to combine remote sensing (RS) and ecosystem services...

Riparian forests in tropical drylands support high biodiversity and provide crucial ecosystem services. Yet, fertile soil, water availability and trees as a source of charcoal and timber make them a favourable place for settlements and subsistence agriculture. The present study aimed at evaluating the floristic diversity of riparian forest remnants...

Aim In tropical Africa, savannas cover huge areas, have high plant species richness and are considered as a major natural resource for most countries. There is, however, little information available on their floristics and biogeography at the continental scale, despite the importance of such information for our understanding of the drivers of speci...

Aim In tropical Africa, savannas cover huge areas, have high plant species richness and are considered as a major natural resource for most countries. There is, however, little information available on their floristics and biogeography at the continental scale, despite the importance of such information for our understanding of the drivers of speci...

The Taita Hills, located in southeastern Kenya, comprise several mountain chains that rise dramatically from the savannah lowlands up to 2,228 m above sea level. It’s an amazing biodiversity hotspot. I led a vegetation survey in the Taita Forests in August 2018. For more information and first results, see: http://blog.zef.de/?p=3474

Significance Identifying and explaining regional differences in tropical forest dynamics, structure, diversity, and composition are critical for anticipating region-specific responses to global environmental change. Floristic classifications are of fundamental importance for these efforts. Here we provide a global tropical forest classification tha...

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6338/635/tab-e-letters In their report “The extent of forest in dryland biomes” (12 May 2017, p. 635), J.-F. Bastin and colleagues identified 1079 million hectares of forest in global dryland biomes based on very high spatial resolution (VHR) images. Forest was defined as “land spanning an area of more tha...

This study explores the use of TerraSAR-X (X-Band) and Sentinel-1 (C-Band) SAR data for detecting degraded forests and deforestation in the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador. The study area shows a complex topography and permanent cloud cover, which complicates forest monitoring from optical remote sensing. Thresholds of canopy cover for degraded f...

Deforestation, forest degradation and the related decline in biodiversity continue to be major issues in tropical countries. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the drivers of deforestation come mostly from outside the forestry sector. For example, natural forests are under pressure from smallholder cultivation practices and charcoal production for everyd...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

This study explores the use of TerraSAR-X (X-Band) and Sentinel-1 (C-Band) SAR data for detecting degraded forests and deforestation in the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador. The study area shows a complex topography and permanent cloud cover, which complicates forest monitoring from optical remote sensing. Thresholds of canopy cover for degraded f...

Diversity patterns of vascular plant species were studied along geographical gradients in the Afromontane regions of Ethiopia. Vegetation data were sampled from five moist evergreen Afromontane forest fragments, namely Harenna (southeast), Bonga, Maji, Berhane-Kontir and Yayu (southwest). In each forest, quadrats of 20x20 m were laid along transect...

This chapter evaluates the global distribution of biodiversity in forests in terms of species and ecosystems. In particular, global ecosystem classification systems are discussed and patterns of species diversity analysed. The availability of global species data has been increasing, especially due to the IUCN Red List initiative and other online da...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

The Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.Congo) has a forest area estimated at about 155 million hectares, which represents up to 61% of the entire Congo Basin forest area. More than 70% of the population of the country depend on forests for their survival and livelihoods. Through the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approx...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

Activities related to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) bear potential benefits for, and also pose risks to, the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES). Next to ecological, socioeconomic and technical factors, the priorities of key actors in REDD+ implementation shape the...

The Ethiopian moist montane forests host high species diversity and are likely to be strongly affected by climate change, as are tropical mountain forest ecosystems worldwide. It is difficult, however, to estimate the impacts of a changing climate on tropical plant species because their specific environmental requirements are often only incompletel...

The climate change mitigation mechanism Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) is currently being negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Integrating biodiversity monitoring into REDD+ facilitates compliance with the safeguards stipulated by the UNFCC...

For REDD+ to achieve synergies between climate and biodiversity objectives, the complex spatial pattern of forest biodiversity needs to be considered. Data on forest cover and species diversity in tropical and subtropical forest types could serve as biodiversity indicators for REDD+ on the global scale. The evaluation of existing global ecological...

Although synergies between reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) and biodiversity conservation are generally expected, they will not be achieved through poorly designed REDD+ schemes. Perceptions of actors in REDD+ implementation processes can guide the design of appropriate policies. Semi-stru...

The current rates of tropical deforestation and forest degradation cause not only a loss of biodiversity but also high emissions of greenhouse gases, and have gained much attention at the international policy level, e.g., under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Global initiati...

full report at: http://www.iufro.org/science/gfep/biodiv-forman-redd-panel/report/

full report available at: http://www.iufro.org/science/gfep/biodiv-forman-redd-panel/report/

Questions How are plant species distribution patterns in tropical montane forest linked to altitude, regional climate and geographic location? Which climatic variables are most important in explaining variations in floristic diversity? What are potential effects of climate change on species diversity? Location Ethiopia. Methods Vegetation surveys...

The UNFCCC mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in developing coun-tries (REDD+) represents an unprecedented opportunity for the conservation of forest biodiversity. Nev-ertheless, there are widespread concerns surrounding the possibility of negative environmental outcomes if biodiversity is not given adequate conside...

Fuelled by the continuing destruction of forests in developing countries and by the unsatisfactory success of previous efforts to curb these developments, since 2005 the aspired REDD+ mechanism and its implementation under the UNFCCC evolved into one of the major issues in the negotiations on a successor agreement for the Kyoto Protocol. Initially,...

Owing to limited funding and time, non-governmental organisations, research institutes and intergovernmental conventions developed different approaches to highlighting those regions on earth that most urgently require conservation efforts. The geographic location of these global conservation priorities is to some extent similar or overlapping, and...

Question: How does the floristic diversity of Afromontane rainforests change along an altitudinal gradient? What are the implications for conservation planning in these strongly fragmented forest areas that form part of the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Hotspot? Location: Bonga, southwestern Ethiopia. Methods: Based on evidence from other montan...

Coffea arabica occurs naturally in the montane rainforests of Ethiopia, but large areas of these unique forests have been converted to other land-uses. In the remaining forest, wild coffee is managed and harvested with increasing intensity because of rising coffee prices in the world market. This study evaluated the impact of coffee management on w...

This study presents a global analysis of forest cover and forest protection. An updated Global Forest Map (using MODIS2005) provided a current assessment of forest cover within 20 natural forest types. This map was overlaid onto WWF realms and ecoregions to gain additional biogeographic information on forest distribution. Using the 2008 World Datab...

2 nd revised edition, January 2009

Rainforest with wild Coffea arabica in the Bonga region is under severe land-use pressure and partly managed as semi-forest coffee (SFC) systems by local farmers. The objective of this study was to conduct vegetation surveys as a basis for conservation planning. Surveys were done in three forest fragments with natural and managed forest parts. In 7...