Stephen J. Leisz

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Colorado State University

Extended growing season lengths under climatic warming suggest increased time for plant growth. However, research has focused on climatic impacts to the timing or duration of distinct phenological events. Comparatively little is known about impacts to the relative time allocation to distinct phenological events, for example, the proportion of time...

The aim of this study is to present a method for estimating the pollutant load from different sources in an effort to provide improved information regarding water pollution and help control the surface water pollution, using Lai Chau city as a case study. The pollutant load was calculated in accordance with the Vietnam Environment Administration De...

The Mekong River (MR) crosses the borders and connects six countries, including China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It provides critical water resources and supports natural and agricultural ecosystems, socioeconomic development, and the livelihoods of the people living in this region. Understanding changes in the runoff of this...

Since the 1990s, forests have changed dramatically, transitioning from net forest loss to net forest increase in Vietnam. This study aims to advance the understanding of the factors driving forest transition at local scales. We employed GIS tools and a structural regression model to quantify the areas of rehabilitated forests and their determinants...

Malnutrition and food insecurity remain high in rural Rwanda, where residents consume a low-diversity diet provided through subsistence farming. Agricultural interventions using kitchen gardens may improve diet diversity in some populations. However, little is known about their efficacy when developed using community-based participatory research in...

The Mekong River (MR) crosses the borders and connects six countries including China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It provides critical water resources and supports natural and agricultural ecosystems, socio-economic development, and livelihoods of the people living in this region. Understanding changes in runoff of this importan...

Systematic review of how remittances affect land systems.

Stretching into pre-history, and before the development and production of artificial fertilizers, the use of animal and human feces, often referred to as “nightsoil”, were widely used to fertilize agricultural fields. Today, the practice of using nightsoil as fertilizer varies by country and by region, throughout the world. Some countries deal with...

This chapter reviews the changes in agricultural land-use in the deltas, lowlands, and uplands of Vietnam and identifies the main trends in changes in agricultural land-use in each of the regions over the past three decades. Agricultural land-use in the deltas, lowlands, and uplands of Vietnam has gone through changes from the early 1990s through t...

Land changes in rangeland systems cascade through interconnected social and ecological spheres, affecting both humans and the environment. This study applied a multi-method approach to examine the causes and consequences of change in two rangeland communities in northeastern (NE) Colorado. First, this study used a Random Forest supervised classifie...

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a co...

Coastal shorelines are naturally dynamic, shifting in response to coastal geomorphological processes. Globally, land use change associated with coastal urban development and growing human population pressures is accelerating coastal shoreline change. In southern Vietnam, coastal erosion currently is posing considerable risks to shoreline land use a...

This study identifies indicators that determine livelihood vulnerability of households to climate change in minority ethnic communities in the northwest mountainous region of Vietnam. The two Thai and H’mong communities were selected for the household survey. Household livelihood vulnerability in each community was assessed using a composite liveli...

Vietnam’s forests have undergone major transformations since the 1990s, including a transition from net forest loss to net expansion, which is attributable to plantation forests and rehabilitated forests. Our study aimed to better understand the patterns and the causes of forest cover rehabilitation in Vietnam to expand tropical forests in other re...

Coffee is considered a boom crop in Southeast Asia. However, while it bears typical boom crop characteristics in many places where it has been grown, in other places it has contributed to agrarian transformation. This paper examines the context of coffee development in the Northwestern Mountain Region of Vietnam and describes how smallholder coffee...

Tropical deforestation has heightened the need for effective governance of protected areas aimed at conserving natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The southern highlands of Ethiopia hold some of the largest expanses of contiguous tropical forest in Ethiopia. This area also is undergoing rapid land conversion. Multiple protected...

High-latitude permafrost regions store large stocks of soil organic carbon (OC), which are vulnerable to climate warming. Estimates of subsurface carbon stocks do not take into account floodplains as unique landscape units that mediate and influence the delivery of materials into river networks. We estimate floodplain soil OC stocks within the acti...

This book is a compilation of policy analyses on shifting cultivation throughout South and Southeast Asia. It is hoped that the availability of these analyses of past and present policies will help governments to formulate better informed policies towards shifting cultivation, that will ultimately contribute to both poverty reduction amongst upland...

New Guinea is widely known for rich biodiversity. This study provides a foundation for understanding vascular and non-vascular plant distributions at the genus taxonomic level. Analyses objectively and quantitatively showed collection density and biases at 50 km spatial resolution and predict genus richness at 1 km spatial resolution. To model the...

Vietnam is a country with high levels of biodiversity, a large and growing population, and experiencing rapid transformations from a developing country to a mid-level economy. This chapter looks at the complexities of managing natural resources and development in northern Vietnam with specific reference to issues related to climate change and the r...

Redefining Diversity and Dynamics of Natural Resources Management in Southeast Asia, Volumes 1-4 brings together scientific research and policy issues across various topographical areas in Asia to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues facing the region. Upland Natural Resources and Social Ecological Systems in Northern Vietnam, Volume 2, p...

This paper examines how the structure of rural households in Northeast Thailand is influenced by the availability of local non-farm employment opportunities. It compares the frequency of different types of households (i.e., nuclear, extended, skipped generation, and truncated households) in two villages that were similar in most respects but differ...

In regions lacking socio-economic data, pairing satellite imagery with participatory information is essential for accurate land-use/cover (LULC) change assessments. At the village scale in Papua New Guinea we compare swidden LULC classifications using remote sensing analyses alone and analyses that combine participatory information and remotely sen...

This study presents a case study of large wood transport on the great Slave River in northern Canada with the objective to better understand the processes of and variability in pulsed wood fluxes from large forested catchments. We use a varied approach, integrating field characterization of wood, historical anecdotes, repeat aerial imagery of store...

This chapter is an overview of the contents of this volume on transforming approaches to natural resources management in northern Vietnam. The uplands of northern Vietnam have seen drastic changes in management strategies and responses by local groups to these strategies since the mid-1980s when doi moi, renovation of the economy and society, start...

It is a conundrum of the 21st Century that there is much left to discover and yet never before has our cultural and ecological patrimony been so threatened. This is especially true in tropical regions where heavy vegetation, inaccessibility, and rugged topography hamper investigation. Here we present two case studies that add to a growing body of l...

This chapter is an overview of the changes in both land use and land cover that have taken place in the lowlands, midlands, and uplands of northern Vietnam between the onset of doi moi and 2012. For the purposes of this review, northern Vietnam is considered inclusive of the area from southern Nghe An Province to the border with China. From a revie...

This study examines the relations of local non-farm employment and out-migration with agriculture in two rural villages in Khon Kaen Province in Northeast Thailand. The villages have similar populations, topography, and agricultural systems, but differing in the number of residents employed in local non-farm regular wage jobs. The availability of l...

In recent years, the concepts of teleconnections and telecoupling have been introduced into land-use and land-cover change literature as frameworks that seek to explain connections between areas that are not in close physical proximity to each other. The conceptual frameworks of teleconnections and telecoupling seek to explicitly link land changes...

Redefining Diversity and Dynamics of Natural Resources Management in Southeast Asia, Volumes 1-4 brings together scientific research and policy issues across various topographical areas in Asia to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues facing the region. Upland Natural Resources and Social Ecological Systems in Northern Vietnam, Volume 2, p...

The Mosquitia ecosystem of Honduras occupies the fulcrum between the American continents and as such constitutes a critical region for understanding past patterns of socio-political development and interaction. Heavy vegetation, rugged topography, and remoteness have limited scientific investigation. This paper presents prehistoric patterns of sett...

Settlement maps for the 19 sites identified in this research. Each map shows digitized archaeological and topographical features. Digitized features are shown over a composite hillshade view taken from 16 different angles draped on a color shaded DSM with a resolution of 1 m/pixel. Contour interval is 25 cm. All visualizations created using high re...

Coastal shorelines are naturally dynamic, shifting in response to coastal geomorphological processes. Globally, land use change associated with coastal urban development and growing human population pressures is accelerating coastal shoreline change. In southern Vietnam, coastal erosion currently is posing considerable risks to shoreline land use a...

Advances in LiDAR technology promise to change the way that ancient architectural remains are documented, analyzed, and managed at Mesoamerican urban centers. Here we discuss the way that LiDAR has helped document the location, temporal associations, and spatial arrangement of ancient architecture at the Purépecha city of Angamuco, located within t...

Powered flight was perfected at the dawn of the twentieth century and ­provided us with a bird’s eye view of large swaths of landscape for the first time in human history. Over the course of the twentieth century, this bird’s eye view expanded to space, as the frontier of powered flight was pushed, literally, to the moon. This chapter overviews the...

The objective of this article is to investigate whether it is possible to use Landsat data together with ancillary data and temporal context to accurately identify land covers found in the fallow areas of Montane Mainland Southeast Asia's (MMSEA's) difficult-to-map swidden landscapes. A rule-based non-parametric hybrid classification method that in...

Policy makers across the tropics propose that carbon finance could provide incentives for forest frontier communities to transition away from swidden agriculture (slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation) to other systems that potentially reduce emissions and/or increase carbon sequestration. However, there is little certainty regarding the carbon ou...

On 15 May 2012, Honduran President Porfirio Lobo convened a press conference to announce that researchers mapping areas of the Mosquitia region of Honduras, using airborne light detection and ranging (lidar), had discovered what appeared to be an extensive complex of archaeological ruins hidden beneath the dense canopy of rain forest that shrouds t...

Background/Question/Methods Deforestation rates in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are more rapid than the Brazilian Amazon. While many factors have been linked to deforestation and land degradation in PNG, the relationship between agricultural practices and deforestation have not been fully examined. The effects of agricultural expansion has been overest...

The application of light detection and ranging (LiDAR), a laser-based remote-sensing technology that is capable of penetrating overlying vegetation and forest canopies, is generating a fundamental shift in Mesoamerican archaeology and has the potential to transform research in forested areas world-wide. Much as radiocarbon dating that half a centur...

This meta-analysis of land-cover transformations of the past 10–15 years in tropical forest-agriculture fronties world-wide shows that swidden agriculture decreases in landscapes with access to local, national and international markets that encourage cattle production and cash cropping, including biofuels. Conservation policies and practices also a...

To assess the role of shifting cultivation as a driving force of land cover change we examined the social, cultural, economic, and spatial dynamics of land use in a Vietnamese village. Instead of the denuded landscapes associated with shifting cultivation, the landscape of Tat hamlet is composed of a heterogeneous mosaic of fields, pastures, and fo...

This paper draws on four hamlet case studies and a broader three district study to identify land cover andland use changes in the upper Ca River Basin of Nghe An Province and the possible trigger events that areinfluencing land cover and land use changes. The study uses two chronosequences of Landsat TM andETM+ imagery, from 1989 to 1993 and from 2...

This paper draws on four hamlet case studies and a broader three district study to identify land cover and land use changes in the upper Ca River Basin of Nghe An Province and the possible trigger events that are influencing land cover and land use changes. The study uses two chronosequences of Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery, from 1989 to 1993 and fro...

This paper examines the land cover and land use changes in one village in the Vietnam's northern mountain region. It overviews the changing forest policies in Vietnam from the country's independence in 1954 to 2005 and relates these changes to the management of forest land at the village level. Findings show that until the late-1980s/early-1990s Vi...

Swidden systems consisting of temporarily cultivated land and associated fallows often do not appear on land use maps or in statistical records. This is partly due to the fact that swidden is a diverse and dynamic land use system that is difficult to map and partly because of the practice of grouping land covers associated with swidden systems into...

Swidden cultivators are often found as a distinct category of farmers in the literature, but rarely appear in population censuses or other national and regional classifications. This has led to a worldwide confusion on how many people are dependent on this form of agriculture. The most often cited number of 200–300 million dates back to the early 1...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

Research in Vietnam's uplands shows that poverty alleviation and environmental protection can be most readily achieved by communities building, protecting, and using their own assets more effectively. This approach starts by looking at what poor people already have, not what they lack. By contrast, government development policies often seek to mode...

This paper describes a research project in northern Vietnam that since 1997 has sought to explore two linked premises1. First, socioeconomic policies and technological conditions operating at the household, community, and broader levels both promote and sustain forest fragmentation. Second, fragmentation of forest cover—including changes in the str...

The paper documents how the implementation of the land tenure policy of the Vietnamese government has affected the agricultural system, livelihood strategies and food self-sufficiency of Thai farmers in a remote upland village, Que, in Nghe An Province, North Central Vietnam. It is shown that the enforcement of restrictions on the area under swidde...

We use a hydrology-based fragmentation index to explore the influence of land-cover distribution on the generation and buffering of Hortonian overland flow (HOF) in two disturbed upland basins in northern Vietnam (Tan Minh). Both the current degree of fragmentation in Tan Minh and the current spatial arrangement of buffers (relative to HOF source a...

The northern mountain region of Vietnam (NMR) is dominated by swidden/fallow farming systems. The fallow land of these systems is populated by small trees and bushes. Since the 1960s the government of Vietnam has tried to limit or stop swiddening and replace it with permanent upland agricultural fields, paddy, fruit trees and animal husbandry. Disc...

Swidden farmers throughout Southeast Asia are rapidly abandoning traditional land use practices. While these changes have been quantified in numerous local areas, no reliable region-wide data have been produced. In this article we discuss three linked issues that account for at least some of this knowledge gap. First, swidden is a diverse, complex,...

Shifting cultivation in the Nghe An Province of Vietnam's Northern Mountain Region produces a characteristic land‐cover pattern of small and larger fields. The pattern is the result of farmers cultivating either individually or in spatially clustered groups. Using spatially explicit agent‐based modelling, and relying on empirical data from fieldwor...

This study investigated land-use and land-cover change in three hamlets and two state rubber farms in the Nan-e watershed of the Xishuangbanna prefecture of Yunnan province in Southwestern China. The overall objective of the study was to understand how state policies affected land use and land cover and how changes in these variables affected farme...

This study tests a method to identify and map the spatial distribution of general farming system types in five districts of the northern mountain region (NMR) of Vietnam. Over the last 50 years the NMR has suffered from a large loss of forest cover, often blamed on the swidden farming systems that are found in the mountains. As a result different p...

A study of air photographs and satellite imagery of a Hani village (Mengsong) in southwestern Yunnan between 1965 and 1993 showed that swidden cultivation did not lead to permanent conversion of forest land to agriculture but rather a conversion of a fairly homogeneous secondary closed-canopy forest into a highly heterogeneous land cover of differe...

Remote sensing data and digital image processing is widespread being used to map tropical rainforest and its changes. The purposes differ from global and regional assessment of forest cover in a global change context to local needs for natural resource planning support. While good accuracies can be obtained using the right methodology (overall accu...

The Ca River Basin is a region of special interest from the point of view of both a rural development and biodiversity conservation. However, the development and conservation situation in the Ca River Basin is quite alarming due to deforestation and agricultural expansion. Recognizing these problems, the government of Vietnam has tried to reduce wh...

This paper examines the land cover and land use changes in one village in the Vietnam's northern mountainregion. It overviews the changing forest policies in Vietnam from the country's independence in 1954to 2005 and relates these changes to the management of forest land at the village level. Findings show thatuntil the late-1980s/early-1990s Vietn...

One of the more familiar themes in Soviet economic literature is the urgency of increasing labor productivity, or put somewhat more broadly and ambitiously, the need to attain "the highest possible effectiveness in the utilization of all productive resources." Some indication of the new manner in which such familiar problems are now being discussed...