Deforestation around the world

386 Pages·2012·38.271 MB·English

by  Paulo Moutinho

DEFORESTATION
AROUND THE WORLD

Edited by Paulo Moutinho
Deforestation Around the World
Edited by Paulo Moutinho

Published by InTech
Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

Copyright © 2012 InTech
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First published March, 2012
Printed in Croatia

A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com
Additional hard copies can be obtained from [email protected]

Deforestation Around the World, Edited by Paulo Moutinho
p. cm.
ISBN 978-953-51-0417-9

Contents

Preface IX
Part 1 Deforestation Impacts 1
Chapter 1 The Climatic Effects of Deforestation
in South and Southeast Asia 3
Rachindra Mawalagedara and Robert J. Oglesby
Chapter 2 Impacts of Deforestation on Climate
and Water Resources in Western Amazon 21
Ranyére Silva Nóbrega
Chapter 3 Deforestation and Water Borne Parasitic Zoonoses 35
Maria Anete Lallo
Chapter 4 Impact of Deforestation on the Sustainability
of Biodiversity in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor 49
Vani Starry Manoharan, John Mecikalski,
Ronald Welch and Aaron Song
Chapter 5 Dinaric Karst – An Example of Deforestation
and Desertification of Limestone Terrain 73
Andrej Kranjc
Chapter 6 Landslides Caused Deforestation 95
Diandong Ren, Lance M. Leslie and Qingyun Duan
Chapter 7 Deforestation Dynamics: A Review and Evaluation
of Theoretical Approaches and Evidence from Greece 123
Serafeim Polyzos and Dionysios Minetos
Part 2 Mapping Deforestation 143
Chapter 8 Geospatial Analysis of Deforestation and Land Use
Dynamics in a Region of Southwestern Nigeria 145
Nathaniel O. Adeoye, Albert A. Abegunde and Samson Adeyinka
VI Contents

Chapter 9 Unsupervised Classification
of Aerial Images Based on the Otsu’s Method 171
Antonia Macedo-Cruz, I. Villegas-Romero,
M. Santos-Peñas and G. Pajares-Martinsanz
Chapter 10 Deforestation and Waodani Lands in Ecuador:
Mapping and Demarcation Amidst Shaky Politics 187
Anthony Stocks, Andrew Noss,
Malgorzata Bryja and Santiago Arce
Chapter 11 Sustainable Forest Management Techniques 203
K.P. Chethan, Jayaraman Srinivasan, Kumar Kriti and Kaki Sivaji
Chapter 12 Bunjil Forest Watch
a Community-Based Forest Monitoring Service 229
Chris Goodman
Chapter 13 Remnant Vegetation Analysis
of Guanabara Bay Basin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
Using Geographical Information System 253
Luzia Alice Ferreira de Moraes
Part 3 Preventing Deforestation 281
Chapter 14 Preserving Biodiversity and Ecosystems:
Catalyzing Conservation Contagion 283
Robert H. Horwich, Jonathan Lyon, Arnab Bose and Clara B. Jones
Chapter 15 Efficiency of the Strategies to Prevent
and Mitigate the Deforestation in Costa Rica 319
Óscar M. Chaves
Chapter 16 Agroforestry Systems
and Local Institutional Development
for Preventing Deforestation in Chiapas, Mexico 333
Lorena Soto-Pinto, Miguel A. Castillo-Santiago
and Guillermo Jiménez-Ferrer
Chapter 17 Economic Models of Shifting Cultivation: A Review 351
Yoshito Takasaki

Preface

Forests are giant reservoirs of carbon and biodiversity that must remain largely intact
if we want to bring global warming under control and preserve life on earth.
However, over the last decade, 13 million ha/year of forests have been deforested in
the word. South America and Africa present the highest deforestation rates (> 3.4
million ha/yr) and forest losses were also intense in many places of Asia. Although
studies don’t always agree, they generally indicate that deforestation causes are
related to infrastructure investments, expansions of agricultural and pasture frontiers,
land tenure issues, absence of adequate surveillance by the government, high demand
for forest products (wood), rural settlements, mining, and logging. International
growing demand for commodities and global land crises can also affect deforestation.
Consequently, the impacts resulting from deforestation can include changes in the
rainfall regime - increasing the risk of forest fires during dry seasons - negative
changes on river level and on the quality of water, as well as enormous biodiversity
losses, considering that more than half of the animals and plants living on the planet
live in forests. Deforestation also dramatically affects human population living in or
from the forests. Indigenous peoples and traditional communities -the natural
guardians of the forests - have seen their territories been reduced or invaded by
deforesters. However, they are the most promising alternative to protect the forests
and simultaneously create a sustainable economy based on forest products.
Despite global consequences, deforestation presents local/regional-based dynamics.
This book provides a general view about this dynamics, incorporating the diversity of
causes, impacts and actions to prevent deforestation in several places around the
world. The chapters are divided in three sections: (I) Deforestation Impacts, (III)
Mapping Deforestation, and (II) Preventing Deforestation.
Chapter 1 (Oglesby) discusses the impacts of land cover changes on the climate in
South and Southeast Asia, and Chapter 2 (Nóbrega) presents the effects of
deforestation on the climate and hydrological cycle in Rondonia state, Brazil, that can
have potential effects on the biodiversity, as indicated by Chapter 3’s (Lallo) study on
parasites population in Brazil. Chapter 4 (Manoharan and colleagues), describes how
deforestation and changes in physical and climate parameters could affect the
potential of environmental protection provided by the Mesoamerican Biological
Corridor (Central America). Then, Chapter 5 (Kranjc) exemplifies the large
X Preface

environmental consequences of deforestation in the Dinaric Karst region, Slovenia,
and finally, Chapter 6 (Diandong et al.) shows how disturbs caused by landslides can
provoke vegetation losses at landscape scale.
The first section is closed by Chapter 7 (Polyzos et al.) and relates the forest land use
changes in Greece and how it has affected the regional and economic development.
The next section, Mapping Deforestation, begins with Chapter 8 by Adeoye et al. They
use a set of images data to analyze the historical deforestation in southwestern Nigeria
demonstrating the potential of the remote-sensing and GIS technology for forest
conservation. Chapter 9 (Macedo-Cruz, et al.) suggests a new remote-sensing
methodology, an unsupervised classification method, with potential to map
deforestation. Stocks et al. (Chapter 10) demonstrate how deforestation mapping is
important for forest protection in the Waodani indigenous land, Ecuador, and Chapter
11 (Jayaraman et al.) discusses the potential of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)
as an accessible and low cost technology that could be useful to monitor the
environment in a large area. Chapter 12 (Goodman) proposes a free public online
service to map the recent forest disturbances in one particular area and explains how it
could attend local communities. Finally, Chapter 13 (De Moraes) provides a time-
series of land-cover in the Guanabara Bay Basin, Brazil, to demonstrate how remote
sensing data is essential to measure the critical changes in vegetation remnants of
Atlantic Forest, the most deforested forest in Brazil, to offer better information for
decision-makers.
On the last section, Preventing Deforestation, Chapter 14 (Horwich et al.)
demonstrates how the community-based initiatives positively affect the conservation
of forests in three different countries, Belize, Namibia and India. Chapter 15 (Chaves)
bring us a review on the potential of different conservation strategies (ecotourism,
payments for environmental services, private reserves, and environmental education)
to mitigate deforestation in Costa Rica. Chapter 16 (Soto-Pinto et al.) reveals how a
sustainable production (agroforestry), reforestation and forest conservation -
developed by the Scolel Té project is dealing with deforestation in Chiapas State,
Mexico. Finally, the Chapter 17 (Taksaki) provides a critical review on how economic
models for shifting cultivation and deforestation are presented by economists and how
these models can be related to deforestation dynamics.
I hope the study-cases reported here may call attention for the velocity we are losing
our forests in a planetary scale and for inestimable impact that will have in human life
quality, in wild life, in water, soil and air and in the world economy. To keep it short,
it won’t be a surprise if the cost to fix the losses would overcome the investments we
have done to achieve the present unsustainable development.
I am grateful to InTech for the opportunity to edit this volume and the authors with
whom I learned so much about the issues of deforestation around the world. I am also