Sharif A. Mukul

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• PhD (Env. Mngt.), MSc (Agri. Dev.), MSc (Forestry), BSc (Hons.)
• Associate Professor at United International University

Effective decision‐making in the protection of nature should be informed by science. Yet, decision‐makers often choose conservation strategies without consulting all relevant evidence. This is partly due to evidence being hidden behind paywalls, presented in overly technical language, and scattered across various journals. To facilitate direct use...

Although Bangladesh is frequently regarded as 'ground zero' for climate change, the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) have only recently been recognized for their environmental vulnerabilities, particularly following the severe rainfall and landslides of 2017. However, attributing these risks solely to climate change oversimplifies the complex interplay...

An in-depth understanding of local plant community assembly is critical to direct conservation efforts to promising areas and increase the efficiency of management strategies. This, however, remains elusive due to the sheer complexity of ecological processes. The maximum entropy-based Community Assembly via Trait Selection (CATS) model was designed...

Plant leaf functional traits significantly influence carbon cycling in tropical forests, though the relationships between these traits and carbon stocks are complex. The present study investigates the role of leaf functional traits, i.e., specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), leaf width, and leaf thickness—on above-ground tree c...

Tropical cyclones are among the most destructive natural hazards that lead to substantial damage to property and loss of lives. As a tropical country prone to natural hazards, Bangladesh’s coast is affected by cyclones each year, leading to significant impacts on coastal communities and infrastructure. To prepare and implement effective cyclone ris...

Co-management is a promising forest governance strategy that integrates local communities’ traditional rights and forest dependencies while aiming to improve forest cover and ecosystem health. Bangladesh, facing high deforestation rates and limited per capita forest area, has implemented co-management initiatives since 2003 to restore forest cover...

The density of wood is a key indicator of the carbon investment strategies of trees, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here we analyse information from 1.1 mil...

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are widely recognized for their support of biodiversity conservation and forest restoration in tropical developing countries. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) of Bangladesh, ethnic forest-dependent communities have long maintained the Village Common Forest (VCF), an ancestral forest managed for community we...

The Sundarbans is the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest with an area of about 10,000 square kilometers and shared between Bangladesh and India. This world-renowned mangrove forest, located on the lower Ganges floodplain and facing the Bay of Bengal, has long served as a crucial barrier, shielding southern coastal Bangladesh from cyclone ha...

Though Bangladesh is often labelled as "climate change ground zero," the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) were never considered a significant climate change hotspot until heavy rainfall and consequent landslides in 2017. This shift in problem narrative seemingly overlooks myriad environmentally unsustainable 'development' initiatives along with (il)leg...

Green spaces play a critical role in enhancing the urban environment, improving livability, and providing essential ecosystem services. A city should have at least 25% green space from an environmental and health point of view. However, quantitative estimation is required to assess the extent and pattern of green space changes for proper urban mana...

Co-management is increasingly recognized as an effective approach of forest governance while recognizing local people's forest dependency and traditional rights. Moreover, co-management is expected to positively impact forest cover and ecosystem health. Bangladesh, facing a rapid decline in forest cover, has one of the lowest per capita forest area...

Mangrove forests, apart from their carbon sequestration and coastal protection benefits, provide a wide range of ecosystem services to people in tropical developing countries. Local people living in and around forests in the developing tropics also depend heavily on these mangrove ecosystem services for their livelihoods. This study examines the im...

Aim: Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the follow...

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...

The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous for...

Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise and other climate-induced extreme events, such as flooding, storm surge, and salinity intrusion. The southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to salinity intrusion caused by cyclone induced storm surges and coastal floods. Salinity intrusion endanger land productivity...

Eucalyptus globulus, commonly known as blue gum or southern blue gum, is a tall, evergreen tree endemic to southeastern Australia. E. globulus is grown extensively in plantations to improve the sustainability of timber and fibre production across Australia. Sustainable forest management practices necessitate the consideration of ‘off-site’ carbon a...

Preventing, halting, and reversing ecosystem degradation is now a global priority, partly due to the declaration of the United Nations (UN) Decade on Ecosystem Restoration by the UN General Assembly 2021–2030 on 1 March 2019. Apart from the most recent global target to protect 30% of the natural planet by 2030 as part of the Kunming-Montreal Global...

The density of wood is a key indicator of trees’ carbon investment strategies, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here, we analyze information from 1.1 million...

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we inve...

Aim To determine the relationships between the functional trait composition of forest communities and environmental gradients across scales and biomes and the role of species relative abundances in these relationships. Location Global. Time period Recent. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We integrated species abundance records from worldw...

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system¹. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests2–5 are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these est...

Understanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, ever...

The tropics contain a vast majority of species, yet our understanding of tropical biodiversity is limited. Here we combine species locality data from scientific databases and social media to examine the coverage of species by existing protected areas in Bangladesh and identify priority areas for future expansion. Although protected areas cover 4.6%...

Worldwide, invasive alien species (IAS) cause significant ecological and economic impacts. To meet the Target-6 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework that deals with IAS, it is crucial to fill the geographical knowledge gaps in invasion research. Towards this end, making available inventories of IAS from data-deficient regions of th...

The relationship between ecosystem functions and plant functional traits has been well documented and is considered to be one of the most vital topics in ecology. However, the correlation between anthropogenic disturbance and tree functional trait diversity remains largely unclear. The present study investigates the role of anthropogenic disturbanc...

Determining the drivers of non-native plant invasions is critical for managing native ecosystems and limiting the spread of invasive species1,2. Tree invasions in particular have been relatively overlooked, even though they have the potential to transform ecosystems and economies3,4. Here, leveraging global tree databases5-7, we explore how the phy...

Bangladesh is one of the emerging economies in the Global South, and rapid urbanization is the driving force behind its economic development. Urban growth and development are closely associated with land use/land cover changes in any area, which sometimes negatively affect the livelihood and wellbeing of local people. We investigated the impacts of...

1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all importa...

Mangrove ecosystems have high ecological and economic value mainly because of their ability to sequester large amounts of carbon and protect shorelines. Monitoring such ecosystems with earth observation data analytics is necessary to achieve deeper insight and subsequent conservation strategies. The Sundarbans is the world’s largest contiguous mang...

Tropical forests are critical for ecosystem functioning and are the major provider of global ecosystem services. The combined effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances in the tropics, however, have caused a mass decline in major ecosystem services in recent decades. Nevertheless, most previous studies focused entirely on these distur...

Due to ongoing and projected climate change as well as increasing anthropogenic disturbances, the tropical deciduous forest has been experiencing a decline in its biomass and productivity. To mitigate this adverse effect, many tropical countries have adopted forest co-management engaging local communities. However, the effects of co-management on t...

The influence of humanity on the environment and the use of natural resources may be affected by spirituality, through awareness for developing a greater conscience about the implications of human actions and needs to adjust these in achieving sustainable development. However, the literature indicates a lack of consensus about op-erationalizing spi...

Shifting cultivation is a dominant land-use in the tropical forest-agriculture frontier in Southeast Asia and is blamed for much of the environmental degradation in the region. We examined the distribution and availability of four soil macronutrients—i.e., soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), in secondary...

Human-induced threats are severely impacting biodiversity globally. Although protected areas play an essential role in safeguarding biodiversity from anthropogenic threats, the performance of such areas in tropical countries remains poorly understood. Here we examined the capacity of protected areas in Bangladesh to represent biodiversity, and iden...

Bangladesh government has recently pledged to restore 0.75 million hectares of degraded forest-land as part of its commitment to the Bonn challenge, however little is known about the potential challenges and opportunities towards achieving that goal. Using secondary literature complemented by expert consultation and a field survey, we examined the...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we...

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and their associated products 1 received huge attention from development workers, practitioner and researchers in 2 the past decades for their potentials for rural development. It is widely recognized AQ1 3 that promoting the sustainable harvest and utilization of NTFPs can contribute to 4 forest conservation. Nev...

The livelihood sustainability of the Rohingya refugees relocated in Bhashan Char, Bangladesh, has been questioned by various international stakeholders due to the remoteness and perceived vulnerabilities of the island. The Bangladesh government, a few international organizations, and some non-government organizations are working on developing livel...

Biodiversity in tropical and subtropical forests are at high risk of decline due to rapid anthropogenic development. Planned activities that potentially benefit communities near forests are often undertaken at the expense of forest biodiversity. Recently, the Government of Bangladesh released plans to develop a safari park in Lathitila forest in no...

Natural ecosystems globally have been disrupted by anthropogenic activities, and the current biodiversity extinction rate exceeds the natural extinction rate by 1000-fold. Protected areas (PAs) help insulate samples of biodiversity from these human-induced threats; however, assessments of the factors threatening biodiversity in PAs are scarce in So...

Mangroves are one the most productive ecosystems on Earth, and they are geographically located in the tropics and sub-tropics. Notwithstanding their critical role in providing a large number of environmental services and benefits as well as livelihood provisions, mangrove forests are being lost globally at an alarming rate. At the same time, they a...

The valuation of natural ecosystems helps policymakers to allocate adequate resources for the provision of ecosystem services they provide. Cultural ecosystem services are the non-material beneits we obtain from nature, which include but are not limited to recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, physical and mental health beneits. They are essential for a...

The metabolism of contemporary industrialized societies, that is their energy and material flows, leads to the overconsumption and waste of natural resources, two factors often disregarded in the global ecological equation. In this perspective article, we examine the amount of natural resources that is increasingly being consumed and wasted by huma...

The amount of carbon stored in deadwood is equivalent to about 8 per cent of the global forest carbon stocks1. The decomposition of deadwood is largely governed by climate2–5 with decomposer groups—such as microorganisms and insects—contributing to variations in the decomposition rates2,6,7. At the global scale, the contribution of insects to the d...

Forest restoration targets are often planned, implemented, measured and reported based on few short‐term lagging indicators (i.e. indicators of realised outcomes), such as the number of seedlings and area planted. We propose the use of leading indicators, which denote likelihood of a certain outcome (e.g. odds that seedlings are of quality and prop...

Deforestation and forest degradation mostly caused by human interventions affect the capacity of the forest ecosystem to provide ecosystem services and livelihood benefits. Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is an emerging concept that focuses on the improvement of the ecosystem as well as the livelihood of the people at the landscape level. Ne...

Deforestation and forest degradation mostly caused by human interventions affect the capacity of the forest ecosystem to provide ecosystem services and livelihood benefits. Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is an emerging concept that focuses on the improvement of the ecosystem as well as the livelihood of the people at the landscape level. Ne...

Bangladesh has a history of species introduction from different geographic regions. The country was a major trade route during the early-modern era and was under British colonial rule until 1947s. Many species of plants and animals are either domesticated or cultivated at different times that were brought into the country by the settlers, seamen, a...

The Philippines is both a biodiversity hotspot and a megadiverse country. The country also has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation in Southeast Asia and is among the first countries to introduce a massive reforestation program to address the country’s rapid biodiversity and forest loss. Drawing upon an empirical study from the Ley...

Mangroves are recognised for their diverse set of ecosystem services, includ ing protection from tropical cyclones and tidal surges. Mangroves are adapted to withstand disturbanc es across a range of clima tic conditions , and the frequency and severity of disturbanc es are projected to increase in the coming years du e to clima te ch ange and sea-...

The valuation of natural ecosystems helps policymakers in allocate adequate resources for the provision of ecosystem services they provide. Cultural ecosystem services are the non-material benefits we obtain from nature, which include but are not limited to recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, physical and mental health benefits. They are essential for...

The importance of local climate and biodiversity in tropical forest’s ability to provide critical ecosystem services is well documented, whereas the relationship among local climatic factors and biodiversity with soil ecosystem function largely remain unclear. We investigated the importance of local rainfall regime and indicators of plant (tree, he...

Globally, forests cover approximately 30% of the world’s land surface and are vital for meeting human needs for food, fuelwood, timber, fodder and medicines. Forests are also critical in providing a wide range of environmental services, including biodiversity conservation, climate regulation, watershed protection and soil amelioration. Despite the...

Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is being carried out across the world to meet ambitious global goals. However, the scale of these efforts combined with the timeframe in which they are supposed to take place may compromise the quality of restoration, and thus limit the persistence of restoration on the landscape. This paper presents a synthes...

Bangladesh has a long history of species introductions from different geographic regions. The country was a major international trade route during the early-modern era and was under British colonial rule until 1947. During this time, many invasive alien species (IAS) that now threaten the country's native flora, fauna and ecosystems were inadverten...

Swidden or shifting cultivation is a widespread yet controversial land-use in the tropical forest–agriculture frontier. In recent years, the extent of land under swidden and the people who rely on it for subsistence and income have declined. We report swidden land-use changes in two central hill districts of Nepal by indigenous Chepang communities—...

Globally, Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) is gaining widespread recognition from governments and policymakers for its potential to restore key ecosystem services and to improve human wellbeing. We organized an international conference on FLR, titled—Forest and Landscape Restoration: Making it Happen, between 25–27 February 2019 in Manila, th...

Padma Bridge is the most challenging construction project in the history of Bangladesh. With its progress and impending completion it will open up huge prospects for local economy. But there is a downside, it also poses an increasing threat to an imperilled ecosystem – Sundarbans – the world's largest mangrove forest stretching over 10,000 square k...

Shifting cultivation is a widespread land-use in the tropics that is considered a major threat to rainforest diversity and structure. In the Philippines, a country with rich biodiversity and high rates of species endemism, shifting cultivation, locally termed as kaingin, is a major land-use and has been for centuries. Despite the potential impact o...

Forests cover about thirty percent of the Earth’s land surface and are important in providing critical ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, storage, and cycling. Forests sequester and store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. In forests, plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen durin...

The Philippines is both a biodiversity hotspot and a megadiverse country. The country also has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation in Southeast Asia and is among the first countries to introduce a massive reforestation program to address the country’s rapid biodiversity and forest loss. Drawing upon an empirical study from the Ley...

Bangladesh has a history of species introduction from different geographic regions. The country was a major trade route during the early-modern era and was under British colonial rule until 1947s. Many species of plants and animals are either domesticated or cultivated at different times that were brought into the country by the settlers, seamen, a...

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Soil salinity is considered as one of the major challenges in coastal agriculture in Bangladesh yet geographical extent of soil salinity and nutrients status have received little or no attention. This study investigated the patterns of soil salinity, total nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and sulfur between agricultural and fallow land along a 90 k...

2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 18...

The Sundarbans, in southern coastal Bangladesh, is the world's largest surviving mangrove habitat and the last stronghold of tiger adapted to living in a mangrove ecosystem. Using MaxEnt (maximum entropy mod- eling), current distribution data, land-use/land cover and bioclimatic variables, we modeled the likely future distribution of the globally e...

A spatially explicit global map of tree symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi reveals that climate variables are the primary drivers of the distribution of different types of symbiosis.