Sacha M. O. Siani

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Geography

The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this g...

As forest demographics are altered by the global decline of old trees and reforestation efforts, younger trees are expected to have an increasingly important influence on carbon sequestration and forest ecosystem functioning. However, the relative resilience of these younger trees to climate change stressors is poorly understood. Here we examine ag...

No presente artigo são analisados e reportados os resultados de uma pesquisa sobre as Representações Sociais (RS) relativas à Educação Ambiental (EA). A pesquisa foi realizada com um grupo de professores de Ensino Fundamental II do sistema público no Vale do Paraíba paulista. A abordagem baseia-se em análise descritiva de dados qualitativos. A cole...

From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping...

Climate change is intensifying tropical cyclones, accelerating sea-level rise, and increasing coastal flooding. River deltas are especially vulnerable to flooding because of their low elevations and densely populated cities. Yet, we do not know how many people live on deltas and their exposure to flooding. Using a new global dataset, we show that 3...

Indigenous territories represent ~45% of land categorized as wilderness in the Amazon, but account for <15% of all forest loss on this land. At a time when the Amazon faces unprecedented pressures, overcoming polarization and aligning the goals of wilderness defenders and Indigenous peoples is paramount, to avoid environmental degradation.

The Amazon biome is crucial for global climate regulation and the provision of a wide array of economic goods and non-market ecosystem services supporting livelihoods from local to global scales. As the largest continuous tropical forested landscape, the Amazon biome covers the territory of nine countries in South America and has long attracted att...

The Amazon biome is crucial for global climate regulation and the provision of a wide array of economic goods and non-market ecosystem services supporting livelihoods from local to global scales. As the largest continuous tropical forested landscape, the Amazon biome covers the territory of nine countries in South America and has long attracted att...

One of the main strategies for Brazilian government to curb deforestation is the creation and management of Conservation Units. The Environmental Protection Area (APA) is a category of Conservation Unit aimed at coupling conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. APAs can be created without the expropriation of land, and may consist of...

The collapse of Fundão dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, released more than 50 million cubic meters of ore tailings into the environment, representing the world's largest mining disaster. Three analyses estimating the forest loss to the ore tailings were produced soon after the collapse but the values varied threefold between them due to differ...

A Área de Proteção Ambiental Mananciais do Rio Paraíba do Sul (APA-MRPS) é um importante instrumento de planejamento territorial ambiental que tem como objetivo proteger os mananciais que abastecem mais de 15 milhões de pessoas no sudeste do Brasil. Este espaço protegido inclui áreas rurais e urbanas, com diferentes contextos sociodemográficos e ní...

Sand pit extraction, known as " Canchas " , is recognized as one of the major environmental problems in northern Acre. Canchas impact the environment by not allowing the native vegetation to regenerate but also polluting water springs in the nearby areas. This paper has two objectives. First, we test the use of the Sentinel-2 data to detect sand pi...

Deforestation rates in Brazilian Amazon declined dramatically since 2004. The expansion of protected areas (PA), law enforcement and a set of policy interventions have contributed to this decrease. This paper aims to develop an exploratory analysis of the space-time patterns of seizures related to illegal logging in the period between 2004 and 2015...

Conservation scientists consider the designation of Protected Areas an important strategy to mitigate socio-environmental damages, biodiversity loss and climate change. Significant environmental impacts are caused every year by fires in Amazonia. In this study, we explore the hypothesis that Protected Areas have an inhibitory role on fire occurrenc...

The Amazon forest is one of the most prominent tropical rainforest worldwide. Providing several benefits, measures to its protection have been included in governmental decision making. In this context, the Brazilian initiative known as PRODES was implemented in 1988. Coordinated by the National Institute of Space Research, INPE, this project monito...

Deforestation rates in Brazilian Amazon declined dramatically since 2004. The expansion of protected areas (PA), law enforcement and a set of policy interventions have contributed to this decrease. This paper aims to develop an exploratory analysis of the space-time patterns of seizures related to illegal logging in the period between 2004 and 2015...

A Área de Proteção Ambiental Mananciais do Rio Paraíba do Sul (APA-MRPS) é um importante instrumento de planejamento territorial ambiental que tem como objetivo proteger os mananciais que abastecem mais de 15 milhões de pessoas dos estados de São Paulo, Minas Gerais e Rio de Janeiro. Este espaço protegido inclui áreas rurais e urbanas, com diferent...

Protected areas of sustainable use such as the Environmental Protection Areas (APA) encompass urban areas. Because the characteristic urban spaces are under dynamic changes, they usually entail problems related to planning land cover. Such areas are fragile, especially when located inside protected areas, so it is necessary to monitor and evaluate...

As protected areas of sustainable use, Environmental Protection Areas (APAs) allow urban areas presence. Urban spaces are usually under dynamic changes, entailing problems related to planning land cover. This paper aims to identify urban patterns presence and evolution for 1984, 1991 and 2000, in the Environmental Protection Area of Mananciais do R...

In order to take advantage of remote sensed data obtained from orbital sensors, one must take into account the presence of suspended particulate matter in the atmosphere like water vapor and aerosols and its influence over the data, for that reason, atmospheric correction algorithms like FLAASH where developed. With that in mind, the present paper...

Classifiers that make use of pixel-by-pixel approaches are limited in the high spatial and radiometric resolution of urban areas, that happens mostly because of the similarity between the target's spectral response like ceramic roofs and bare soil. Because of that, the literature favors approaches that make use of object-oriented analysis for image...

Este trabalho tem como objetivo geral identificar locais que concentram populações em diferentes condições de sustentabilidade. Apresenta-se uma primeira abordagem para operacionalizar o conceito de desenvolvimento sustentável tendo como foco o município de Ubatuba, propondo como ferramenta um indicador em escala intraurbana, intitulado Índice de S...