About
131
Publications
55,835
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,758
Citations
Introduction
My goal: building quantitative understanding of how to optimally achieve ecosystem service production and biodiversity conservation in multi-use landscapes. My work addresses unanswered, fundamental ecological questions while directly informing how to sustainably manage temperate and tropical ecosystems.
Publications
Publications (131)
The coexistence of tree species in tropical forests has remained challenging to explain, characterise and predict with simple theoretical models. To address this phenomenon researchers have focused on processes and factors omitted in simple competition models. Meantime, theoretical considerations of simple models have sought out conditions for stab...
Mitigating climate change cost-effectively requires identifying least-cost-per-ton GHG abatement methods. Here, we estimate and map GHG abatement cost (US$ per tCO2) for two common reforestation methods: natural regeneration and plantations. We do so by producing and integrating new maps of implementation costs and opportunity costs of reforestatio...
Contemporary resource management is doubly burdened by high rates of organic material disposal in landfills, generating potent greenhouse gases (GHG), and globally degraded soils, which threaten future food security. Expansion of composting can provide a resilient alternative, by avoiding landfill GHG emissions, returning valuable nutrients to the...
Nature-based climate solutions, such as forest landscape restoration, offer a promising approach to mitigate the effects of global climate change, conserve biodiversity, and enhance rural livelihoods. Heinrich et al. (Nature, 2023) used satellite observation products to assess rates and drivers of aboveground carbon accumulation in tropical recover...
International environmental initiatives, such as the Bonn Challenge and the UN Decade on Restoration, have prompted countries to put the management and restoration of forest landscapes at the center of their land use and climate policies. To support these goals, many governments are promoting forest landscape restoration and management through fina...
Carbon offsets are widely promoted as a strategy to lower the cost of emission reductions, but recent findings suggest that offsets may not causally reduce emissions by the amount claimed. In a compliance market, offsets increase net emissions if they do not reflect real emission reductions beyond the baseline scenario. Few studies have examined th...
The numerous tree species co-occurring in tropical forests presents a challenging puzzle ¹ . Conventional competition models suggest that such coexistence is improbable 2–7 , but this study offers a novel solution. By modelling interspecific competition as both competitive intensity and susceptibility, we provide conditions for stable coexistence o...
Purpose of the Review
Improved forest management is a promising avenue for climate change mitigation. However, we lack synthetic understanding of how different management actions impact aboveground carbon stocks, particularly at scales relevant for designing and implementing forest-based climate solutions. Here, we quantitatively assess and review...
Improved forest management (IFM) has the potential to remove and store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. Around the world, 293 IFM offset projects have produced 11% of offset credits by voluntary offset registries to date, channeling substantial climate mitigation funds into forest management projects. This paper summarizes the state...
Given California’s and China’s ambitious climate goals and their history of climate policy collaboration, understanding the emissions associated with their wood products is an important step in building more sustainable supply chains globally. In this policy brief, we estimate the carbon associated with wood product imports into California and Chin...
Biophysical and socio-cultural factors have jointly shaped the distribution of global biodiversity, yet relatively few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of social and ecological landscapes on wildlife distributions. We sought to determine whether social and ecological covariates shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species...
We assess the economic welfare implications of developing and introducing a gene‐edited banana with resistance against an emerging plant disease, Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense Tropical race 4, on global banana production. Using a model incorporating disease dynamics and diffusion of a technological solution, we find that a 5‐year delay in adopti...
Wildfires play an important ecological role in fire-adapted landscapes throughout California. However, there is a growing awareness that large wildfires in increasingly populated areas incur costs that may not be acceptable to society. Various forest management strategies have been proposed that seek to reduce the prevalence and severity of wildfir...
Contemporary food and agricultural systems degrade soils, pollute natural resources, and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The waste output from these systems, however, can be repurposed as an agricultural input, reducing emissions associated with organics disposal while actively sequestering atmospheric carbon in soils – thus transitioning t...
Biophysical and socio-cultural factors have jointly shaped the distribution of global biodiversity, yet relatively few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of social and ecological landscapes on wildlife distributions. We sought to determine whether social and ecological covariates shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species...
Global mapping efforts to date have relied on vague and oversimplified definitions of “abandoned” agricultural land which results in overestimates of the land area that is likely to support persistent increases in forest cover and associated carbon sequestration. We propose a new conceptualization of abandoned agricultural land that incorporates ch...
Restoring forest cover is a key action for mitigating climate change. Although monoculture plantations dominate existing commitments to restore forest cover, we lack a synthetic view of how carbon accumulates in these systems. Here, we assemble a global database of 4756 field-plot measurements from monoculture plantations across all forested contin...
To better account for how social–ecological legacies of social and ecological systems jointly shape the current composition, the quality and quantity of nature’s contribution to people (NCPs), we integrate the concept of NCP co-production into social–ecological system thinking. Our expanded framework highlights how NCP co-production is frequently e...
Significance
We provide the first assessment of aboveground live tree biomass in a mixed conifer forest over the late Holocene. The biomass record, coupled with local Native oral history and fire scar records, shows that Native burning practices, along with a natural lightning-based fire regime, promoted long-term stability of the forest structure...
Converting mangroves to other land cover types can induce large emissions of carbon dioxide, depending on the type of land use and land cover (LULC) change. However, mangroves may also recover their ecosystem carbon stocks rapidly following restoration, potentially offsetting carbon stock losses. While studies have quantified these tradeoffs at glo...
1. Land-use change and political–economic shifts have shaped hunting patterns globally, even as traditional hunting practices endure across many local socio-cultural contexts. The widespread expansion of oil palm cultivation, and associated urbanization, alters land-use
patterns, ecological processes, economic relationships, access to land and soci...
Increasing global food production and livelihoods while maintaining ecosystem health will require significant changes in the way existing farming landscapes are managed. To this end, developing a systemic understanding of the economic and ecological impacts of different cropping systems, and identifying trade-offs and synergies between them, is cru...
Quantitative reconstructions of vegetation abundance from sediment-derived pollen systems provide unique insights into past ecological conditions. Recently, the use of pollen accumulation rates (PAR, grains cm−2 year−1) has shown promise as a bioproxy for plant abundance. However, successfully reconstructing region-specific vegetation dynamics usin...
Artisanal and small-scale mining is a significant and growing livelihood across the global South, which all too often leaves a legacy of contaminated landscapes. Given the increasing reliance of economies on metals and minerals, it is critical to understand what controls contamination outcomes in this rapidly developing extractive practice. Here, w...
1. The widespread expansion of oil palm cultivation alters land-use, economic relationships, land ownership and access, and social practices across tropical forest landscapes globally. These shifts, primarily driven by broader structural forces of globalized commodity chains and transnational land grabs, profoundly reshape local socio-ecological re...
Historical baselines of forest conditions provide reference states to assess how forests have changed through time. In California, the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) provides tree inventory data between 1872 and 1884 at 93.2-km 2 (36 mi 2) resolution. Although these data provide a spatially extensive record of settlement-era forest conditions, re...
Despite its broad implications for community structure and dynamics, we lack a clear understanding of how forest productivity is partitioned among tree species. As leaf mass per unit of standing biomass declines with tree size, species achieving larger stature should show lower relative productivity as compared to smaller stature species. However,...
Estimating baseline carbon stocks is a key step in designing forest carbon programs. While field inventories are resource-demanding, advances in predictive modeling are now providing globally coterminous datasets of carbon stocks at high spatial resolutions that may meet this data need. However, it remains unknown how well baseline carbon stock est...
Food waste measurement and policy often seek to differentiate between edible food and associated inedible parts, acknowledging different underlying causes for discard and different preferred solutions for waste management. Given the varying views of edibility within and across cultures, there is no widely agreed upon or universal categorization. To...
>>>Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/b1tMU <<<
The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.
Understanding the trade‐offs between biodiversity conservation and agricultural production has become a fundamental question in sustainability science. Substantial research has focused on how species’ populations respond to agricultural intensification, with the goal to understand whether conservation policies that spatially separate agriculture an...
Forests play a central role in addressing climate change, and accurate estimates of forest carbon are critical for the development of actions that reduce emissions from forests and that maximize sequestration by forests. Methodological challenges persist regarding how best to estimate forest carbon stocks and flux at regulatory-relevant scales. Usi...
Leading societies toward a more sustainable, equitably shared, and environmentally just future requires elevating and strengthening conversations on the nonmaterial and perhaps unquantifiable values of nonhuman nature to humanity. Debates among conservationists relating to the appropriateness of valuing ecosystems in terms of their human utility ha...
The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus concept has emerged as a powerful approach to address the social and environmental challenges created by land and climate change. We present an analysis of the impact of the governance structure of the Lower Colorado River Basin (LCRB) on the implementation of the FEW nexus concept. Specifically, we quantified the...
Simultaneous measurement of plant functional traits and the regeneration environment should shed light on the plant-environment interactions and feedbacks as secondary forest regenerates. However, little of such work has been done in the wet tropics, and even fewer studies have examined soil nutrients. We investigated whether plant functional trait...
Tropical bamboos persist in a wide range of light conditions and quickly respond to changes in light availability. However, the mechanisms underpinning this ability remain unknown. In order to test the hypothesis that the modular and hollow culm architecture of bamboos explains their performance in a wide range of light environments, we determined...
Reducing food waste has many positive environmental and socio-economic ramifications. Even though many programs exist to reduce the amount of food waste, the attitudes and the behaviors driving food waste as well as the strategies to reduce it remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate how restaurateurs in Berkeley, California, USA per...
Illegal private land deforestation threatens global biodiversity, even in areas with native habitat requirements stipulated by law. Compliance can be improved by allowing landholders to meet legal reserve requirements by buying and selling the rights to have deforested land through a Tradeable Development Rights system ( TDR ). While this policy me...
Food, energy, and water (FEW) systems are inexorably linked. Earth's changing climate and increasing competition for finite land resources are creating and amplifying challenges at the FEW nexus. Managing FEW systems to mitigate these negative impacts and stresses is a pressing policy issue. The FEW interface is often managed as three independent s...
Native species that forage in farmland may increase their local abundances thereby affecting adjacent ecosystems within their landscape. We used two decades of ecological data from a protected primary rainforest in Malaysia to illutrate how subsidies from neighboring oil palm plantations triggered powerful secondary 'cascading' effects on natural h...
Minimizing the negative impacts of tropical agricultural expansion and intensification on biodiversity and food security has been intensively discussed in the context of the land-sparing/land-sharing framework. Here, we evaluate how study scope, methodologies, and geographical focus, number of species studied, and type of cropping system helped to...
Mangrove forests are important natural ecosystems due to their ability to capture and store large amounts of carbon. Forest structural parameters, such as canopy height and above-ground biomass (AGB), provide a good measure for monitoring temporal changes in carbon content. The protected coastal mangrove forest of the Everglades National Park (ENP)...
Height–diameter (H–D) models can be used to predict missing tree heights from diameter at breast height measurements for many forest management applications. A major challenge in developing H–D models for tropical forests is many rare tree species with very few observations. This study utilized the taxonomic hierarchy of genus and species as random...
High-severity wildfires increasingly influence forests in the western United States. Extensive research has identified preventative practices including mechanical and prescribed fire treatments to reduce wildfire severity in mature stands. Yet limited research has investigated fuel management treatments in young stands which can be particularly vul...
Understandings of contemporary forest cover loss are critical for policy but have come at the expense of long-term, multi-directional analyses of land cover change. This is a critical gap given (i) profound reconfigurations in land use and land control over the past several decades and (ii) evidence of widespread "woodland resurgence" throughout th...
Questions
What processes govern the long‐term recovery of tropical secondary forests? Specifically, how are seedling species density, stem density and functional groups in older regenerating forests affected by existing trees, the regeneration environment and distance to seed sources?
Location
Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Singapore.
Methods...
The discovery that the stratospheric ozone layer can be eroded by human activities along with the existence of a larger-than-expected hole over Antarctica more than 30 years ago propelled the use of remote sensing of Earth’s atmospheric structure for more than weather forecasting; it became central to observation research and a tool for the develop...
Techniques that are conventionally used to process remotely sensed data into geospatial input or output products (e.g., classified maps) for further analysis and application are discussed in this chapter. This chapter focuses on the processing of moderate-spatial-resolution, multispectral digital image data, such as the imagery captured by the Land...
In the previous chapters, we have discussed how the scientific community, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private industry, and the general public use the wealth of information provided by airborne and satellite remote sensing data. We have presented specific examples of its cost-effective and timely use in a wide range o...
Each day, millions of individual images and observations collect an enormous variety of information about the Earth’s surface and subsurface. This routine surveillance enables the monitoring and modeling of ecosystem health, detecting seismic activity, identifying surface vegetation, promoting sustainable agriculture, and characterizing the physica...
As noted in Chap. 1, remotely sensed data are collected by a diverse array of passive and active sensors mounted on aircraft (including airplanes, helicopters, and uninhabited aerial systems) or spacecraft (usually satellites). During the latter half of the twentieth century, large-scale space programs such as National Aeronautics and Space Adminis...
The use of remote sensing perhaps goes all the way back to prehistoric times when the early man stood on a platform in front of his cave and glanced at the surrounding landscape (late Robert N. Colwell, UC Berkeley). These humans were remotely sensing the features in the landscape to determine the best places to gather food and water and how to avo...
Marine environments contain substantial biological diversity, deliver vital ecosystem services, supply valuable natural resources, and are a core component of our weather and climate system. However, the ocean environment is complex and ever-changing. Examining how our oceans, atmosphere, and landmasses interact would be virtually impossible withou...
Many technological developments in remote sensing are at least partially rooted in space exploration efforts; for instance, imaging spectroscopy—hyperspectral imaging—was developed in parallel for terrestrial and planetary applications. Of course, what are perhaps the best-known space exploration efforts have actually involved direct (i.e., non-rem...
Remote sensing has been identified as one of the most significant technological achievements of the twentieth century. Earth observation satellites transcend national boundaries and geophysical space, creating transparency into activities and places that were once concealed from foreign states. This raises many issues—the ideals of cooperation, soc...
This textbook is one of the first to explain the fundamentals and applications of remote sensing at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Topics include definitions and a brief history of payloads and platforms, data acquisition and specifications, image processing techniques, data integration and spatial modeling, and a range of applications cov...
Abstract Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain how vertical and horizontal heterogeneity in light conditions enhances tree species coexistence in forest ecosystems. The foliage partitioning theory proposes that differentiation in vertical foliage distribution, caused by an interspecific variation in mortality-to-growth ratio, promotes...
Decisions concerning future land use/land cover change stand at the forefront of ongoing debates on how to best mitigate climate change. In this study we compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation value over a 30-year time frame for a range of forest recovery and biofuel production scenarios on abandoned agricultural land. Carbon sequestration in...
Mangroves are among the ecosystems with the highest potential for carbon sequestration and storage. In these ecosystems and others above-ground biomass (AGB) is often used to estimate above-ground carbon content. We used a Leica-ScanStation-C10 Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) to estimate the volume and AGB of 40 mangrove trees distributed in three...
The expansion of row crop agriculture in the US is a major threat to grassland ecosystems and the biodiversity that they support. In this paper we developed an integrated econometric-ecological modeling framework that examines the impact of changing prices for agricultural commodities on grassland bird abundance in the Midwest United States. Our ec...
Reserve establishment and strategic harvest planning are two longstanding but often separate approaches to conserving biodiversity in working landscapes. Our paper unites these fields and explores how ecological characteristics of landscapes influence conservation outcomes, with a particular consideration of tropical forests. We used an integer pro...
Significance
Tropical forests, especially the primary tropical forests that are globally important for biodiversity conservation and carbon storage, are increasingly concentrated in relatively wealthier developing countries. This creates an opportunity for domestic funding by these countries to play a larger role in ( i ) closing the funding gap fo...
Substantial discussion exists concerning the best land use options for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on marginal land. Emissions-mitigating land use options include displacement of fossil fuels via biofuel production and afforestation. Comparing C recovery dynamics under these different options is crucial to assessing the efficacy of of...
The incentives for resource extraction and development make the conservation of biodiversity challenging within tropical forestlands. The 2007 establishment of the Royal Belum State Park in the Malaysian state of Perak offers lessons for creating protected areas in tropical countries where subnational governments are major forestland owners. This a...
Tree architecture, growth, and mortality change with increasing tree size and associated light conditions. To date, few studies have quantified how size-dependent changes in growth and mortality rates co-vary with architectural traits, and how such size-dependent changes differ across species and possible light capture strategies. We applied a hier...