By paying farmers and former loggers to serve as stewards of the country's woodlands, instead of simply banning deforestation, the country gained much more forest than it lost in the decade after it kicked off the program.
To estimate how much more forest would have been cleared in the protected areas if the lands were not protected, we applied the forest area loss rates detected in the corresponding unprotected areas within the same state.
We also estimated how much more forest would have remained forest, and how much carbon emissions could have been reduced, if land use policies designed to reduce forest area loss (either by restrictions, or through incentives) were implemented in the 48 states' unprotected forests.
Species area curves based on 'forest species' alone show that the understorey environment of jungle rubber supports intermediate numbers of 'forest species' and is much more forest-like than that of rubber plantations, but less than primary forest.
Upon leaving the Smithville area, the land gets much more forested.
To replace tree-thinking, they argue for a more accommodating framework in which trees are located in a much more tangled forest, and the emphasis is placed on achieving a genuine understanding of the forest.
They also cannot address questions of how perturbations affect biodiversity - a tree monoculture may have similar carbon stocks and flows to a much more diverse forest - nor do they easily lend themselves to answering evolutionary questions.
Catch crop-pea and catch crop-corn fields emitted more N2O than wheat and rapeseed fields, and much more than forests.
Forest clearance is much more extensive than forest gains from agriculture.
For example, two of the most ecologically important parameters, the overall rates of tree mortality and recruitment, were spatially much more variable near forest edges (plot center<100 m from edge) than in forest interiors (>100 m from edge).
As I aged, I learned that there was much more to a forest than trees, and I began to glimpse the extraordinary symbiotic connections between soil, land shape, weather, senescence, decay, propagation, seeds and roots, insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals, including humans.
