Digital Commons Network^™

Overlapping Extractive Land Use Rights Increases Deforestation And Forest Degradation In Managed Natural Production Forests, Bingcai Liu, Anand Roopsind, Brent Sohngen

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Guyana manages an estimated 5.3 million hectares of old-growth tropical forests, 29% of its total forest area, for timber extraction. Individuals and companies can apply for time-limited leases that allocate access, management, and extraction rights for timber through a concession system. In many tropical regions, including Guyana, a lack of integrated land use planning often leads to overlapping extractive and forest use rights for logging and mining. Overlapping land rights in turn create uncertainty and limit investments toward sustainable forest management, affecting deforestation and forest degradation rates. In this study, we use matched fixed-effect and difference-in-differences panel data models to …

Improved Fine-Scale Tropical Forest Cover Mapping For Southeast Asia Using Planet-Nicfi And Sentinel-1 Imagery, Feng Yang, Xin Jiang, Alan D. Ziegler, Lyndon Estes, Jin Wu, Anping Chen, Philippe Ciais

Geography

The accuracy of existing forest cover products typically suffers from “rounding” errors arising from classifications that estimate the fractional cover of forest in each pixel, which often exclude the presence of large, isolated trees and small or narrow forest clearings, and is primarily attributable to the moderate resolution of the imagery used to make maps. However, the degree to which such high-resolution imagery can mitigate this problem, and thereby improve large-area forest cover maps, is largely unexplored. Here, we developed an approach to map tropical forest cover at a fine scale using Planet and Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery …

Combining Community Observations And Remote Sensing To Examine The Effects Of Roads On Wildfires In The East Siberian Boreal Forest, Vera Kuklina, Oleg Sizov, Victor Bogdanov, Natalia Krasnoshtanova, Arina Morozova, Andrey N. Petrov

Faculty Publications

The paper is aimed at assessing the associations between the road networks geography and dynamics of wildfire events in the East Siberian boreal forest. We examined the relationship between the function of roads, their use, and management and the wildfire ignition, propagation, and termination during the catastrophic fire season of 2016 in the Irkutsk Region of Russia. Document analysis and interviews were utilized to identify main forest users and road infrastructure functional types and examine wildfire management practices. We combined community observations and satellite remotely sensed data to assess relationships between the location, extent, and timing of wildfires and different …

Where Did My Land Go?: “Land Rights For Quilombolas And Indigenous Peoples In Brazil”, Joyia Smikle

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Masters Projects

This ArcGIS storymap project explores the history of the Quilombolas, the Afro-Brazilian people in Brazil that are descendants of enslaved Africans, and the path to land rights for the Quilombos. In addition this study looks at Indigenous land rights and the importantance of their sustainable practices to the health of the Amazon.

For access to the Storymap including full functionality with the maps, please go to “https://arcg.is/mXumD ”

Unsettling Participation By Foregrounding More-Than-Human Relations In Digital Forests, Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys, Danilo Urzedo, Max Ritts

Geography

The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of "unsettling"to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest …

Safeguarding Sandalwood: A Review Of Current And Emerging Tools To Support Sustainable And Legal Forestry, Ellyse Bunney, Francesca A. Mcinerney, Eleanor Dormontt, Arif Malik, Nina Welti, David Wilkins, Malcolm Plant, Dhanushka S. Hettiarachchi, Darren Thomas, Ashley Dowell, Tresa Hamalton, Andrew J. Lowe

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Societal Impact Statement: Sandalwood and other high value tree species are under significant threat from illegal harvest. Illegal logging is an increasing problem contributing to deforestation, biodiversity loss, human rights abuses and funding transnational crime. Successful prosecution of illegal logging is hindered by a lack of methods to provide evidence of the origin of timber. New analytical techniques have been developed to trace timber back to its source. These methods, together with the establishment of sustainable sources of forest resources, can help protect vulnerable species by providing evidence to prosecute illegal harvest and ensure that commercially available forest products come …

Drug Wars, Drug Violence, And Drug Addiction In The Americas, David T. Courtwright

UNF Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Human Rights And Climate Change For Climate Litigation In Brazil And Beyond: An Analysis Of The Climate Fund Decision, Maria Antonia Tigre, Joana Setzer

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

In 2022, the Brazilian Supreme Court announced a groundbreaking decision in the Climate Fund case. The decision, rendered amidst a challenging political climate, acknowledges the significance of the Paris Agreement within the country’s legal framework. The Court’s ruling established that the executive branch has a constitutional obligation to allocate funds from the Climate Fund for climate change mitigation and adaptation, grounded in the constitutional right to a healthy environment, international rights and commitments, and the principle of separation of powers.

Notably, the Court recognized the Paris Agreement as a human rights treaty, granting it “supranational” status. The implications of the …

Regulation Weakness And Lack Of Public Awareness Has Impeded The Implementation Of Environmental Policies In Saudi Arabia, Nada Gurmalla Algamdy

Dissertations & Theses

This research aimed to substantially illustrate that the weakness of environmental regulations and lack of public participation in urban planning alongside poor public awareness in Saudi Arabia has inhibited the implementation of environmental policies across this region. To study these issues, this research compared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (“KSA”) to the United States (“US”) building on numerous studies to illustrate how the identified weaknesses correlate with weak or ineffective environmental policies. It is well known that it would be better to use a European country “because it's known that the EU has tough environmental measures" as a model for …

Ginanaandawi'idizomin: Anishinaabe Intergenerational Healing Models Of Resistance, Zoe V. Allen

American Studies Honors Projects

Since the early 2000s, the opioid epidemic has had a devastating sweep across Indian Country. The White Earth nation declared the epidemic as a public health emergency back in 2011. Since then White Earth has developed community-based harm reduction and culturally grounded models of intervention for substance use disorder that continue to influence Native Nations across the U.S. This project centers on Anishinaabe approaches to the ongoing opioid public health crisis but also elaborates on Anishinaabe forms of healing and resistance. My primary method was conducting oral histories with White Earth community youth workers and advocates. My research project asks: …

Monarch Butterflies: Rearing Methodologies And The Impact Of Fungicide And Insecticide Exposures, Matthew Greiner

Department of Entomology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The North American migratory monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus L., populations has experienced a ca. 90% decline over the past two decades. The decline is attributed to climate change, loss and degradation of overwintering habitat, and the loss of milkweed plants in the midwestern United States. The remaining milkweed stands often occur close to agricultural fields, and efforts to establish additional milkweed on the landscape focus on agricultural systems. However, milkweed plants near agricultural fields are likely exposed to pesticides that could adversely impact monarch caterpillars. Effective management of milkweed habitat supporting monarch caterpillars requires knowledge about the toxicological impacts of …

Covid-19 Pandemic Effects On The Environment, Ken Overway, Phillips Lane

Chemistry Faculty Scholarship

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been a constant in everyone’s lives for almost the past three years now and has embedded itself into basically every part of global society and norms. The main areas where this is evident are in the major disruptions in the economic, social, and public health sectors of the world. There is one other area that has been affected by this prolonged pandemic in a multitude of ways, the environment. Our environment, both globally and regionally, has seen both positive and negative effects throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in a variety of different areas. …

A Review Of Carbon Monitoring In Wet Carbon Systems Using Remote Sensing, Anthony D. Campbell, Temilola Fatoyinbo, Sean P. Charles, Laura L. Bourgeau-Chavez, Joaquim Goes, Helga Gomes, Meghan Halabisky, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Holmquist, Steven Lohrenz, Catherine Mitchell, L. Monika Moskal, Benjamin Poulter, Han Qiu, Celio H. Resende De Sousa, Michael Sayers

Michigan Tech Publications

Carbon monitoring is critical for the reporting and verification of carbon stocks and change. Remote sensing is a tool increasingly used to estimate the spatial heterogeneity, extent and change of carbon stocks within and across various systems. We designate the use of the term wet carbon system to the interconnected wetlands, ocean, river and streams, lakes and ponds, and permafrost, which are carbon-dense and vital conduits for carbon throughout the terrestrial and aquatic sections of the carbon cycle. We reviewed wet carbon monitoring studies that utilize earth observation to improve our knowledge of data gaps, methods, and future research recommendations. …

Investing In Monarch Conservation: Understanding Private Funding Dynamics, Rodrigo Solis-Sosa, Christina A.D. Semeniuk, Maxim Larrivée, Sean Cox

Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research Publications

Non-profit environmental organizations (NGOs) rely heavily on external donors to fulfill their mandates. However, forecasting donations for long-term planning is an elusive task at best. The non-compulsory nature of donation requires NGOs to understand how donors’ attention and funding allocations change over time as conservation scenarios change and incorporate these insights into their budgeting plans. We hypothesize that an NGO can hinder its capacity to reach its conservation goals by neglecting its donor-NGO-natural system (DNNS), which is reactive to the socio-ecological context. To test our hypothesis, we compared the ecological outcomes derived from a budgeting strategy assuming donors have a …

Standing For Rivers, Mountains - And Trees - In The Anthropocene, David Takacs

Faculty Scholarship

In his well-known article, Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, Professor Christopher Stone proposed that courts grant nonhuman entities standing as plaintiffs so their interests may directly represented in court. In this Article, I review Stone’s ideas about standing and our relationship with the natural environment and describe the current, burgeoning, widespread trend toward granting not just standing, but legal rights and legal personhood to rivers, mountains, and other natural entities. I analyze the ways in which courts and legislatures in New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, and elsewhere are addressing concerns similar to Stone’s with expansive, even radical …

Four Perspectives On A Sustainable Future In Nosara, Costa Rica, Greg Munno, Álvaro Salas Castro, Tina Nabatchi, Christian M. Freitag

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The town of Nosara on Costa Rica’s Nicoya peninsula is home to a vibrant community of diverse residents and is adjacent to an important turtle nesting site. However, tensions between lifelong residents, more recent transplants, visitors, and developers have increased as more of the world discovers this once-isolated haven. Climate change, income inequality, and alienation from a distant government apparatus have further complicated effective land-use planning and fractured social cohesion. Using a mixed-method approach of in-depth interviews (n = 67), Q methodology (n = 79), and public deliberation (n = 88), we explored residents’ priorities for the future of their …

Global Forces Of Change: Implications For Forest-Poverty Dynamics, Priya Shyamsundar, Laura Aileen Sauls, Jennifer Zavaleta Cheek, Kira Sullivan-Wiley, J.T. Erbaugh, P. P. Krishnapriya

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

This article examines global trends likely to influence forests and tree-based systems and considers the poverty implications of these interactions. The trends, identified through a series of expert discussions and review of the literature, include: (i) climatic impacts mediated through changes in forests, (ii) growth in commodity markets, (iii) shifts in private and public forest sector financing, (iv) technological advances and rising interconnectivity, (v) global socio-political movements, and (vi) emerging infectious diseases. These trends bring opportunities and risks to the forest-reliant poor. A review of available evidence suggests that in a business-as-usual scenario, the cumulative risks posed by these global …

Social And Environmental Issue Of Deforestation In Papua, Indonesia, Briantama Asmara

English Language Institute

This poster aims to cover social and environmental impacts of deforestation in Papua. This research was based on literature review from various authors.

Toxicology Of Chemical Stress To Monarch Butterflies (Danaus Plexippus L.), Annie Krueger

Department of Entomology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus L.) population declines have caught the attention of the country and prompted nationwide conservation initiatives. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service has identified insecticide exposure and loss of milkweed (Asclepias spp.) reproductive habitat as primary threats to the monarch. In the Midwestern US, milkweed largely occurs around cropland borders where there may be a spatial and temporal overlap of monarch larvae, insecticide usage, and fertilizer applications. In this study, the acute toxicity and sub-lethal effects on growth and diet consumption of two commonly used pyrethroid insecticides, bifenthrin and beta-cyfluthrin, were characterized …

“Indigenous Women On The Frontlines Of Climate Activism: The Battle For Environmental Justice In The Amazon” Sônia Guajajara And Célia Xakriabá, Malcolm Mcnee, Sônia Guajajara, Célia Xakriabá

Spanish and Portuguese: Faculty Publications

In this public address, transcribed and translated from the Portuguese, two leaders of Brazil’s pan-ethnic Indigenous rights movement, Sônia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá, describe their respective formation, their involvement in environmental and human rights struggles, and the global stakes involved in the recognition and protection of the traditional territorial claims and land-use practices of Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon and beyond.

Money Growing On Trees: A Classroom Game About Payments For Ecosystem Services And Tropical Deforestation, Sahan Dissanayake, Sarah A. Jacobson

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs use an incentive-based approach to pursue environmental goals. While they are common policy tools, key concepts determining their efficacy are nuanced and hard to grasp. This article presents a new interactive game that explores the functioning and implications of PES programs. Participants play the role of rural households in a developing country, deciding individually or as groups whether to enter into contracts to refrain from reducing local forests in exchange for payment from a forest-based PES initiative. The game explores topics that include PES programs, climate change, tropical deforestation, cost-effectiveness, additionality, illegal harvest and …

(Post-) Pandemic Tourism Resiliency: Southeast Asian Lives And Livelihoods In Limbo, Kathleen M. Adams, Jaeyeon Choe, Mary Mostafanezhad, Giang Thi Phi

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

While tourism scholars have sought to problematize the unevenly distributed impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know much less about how resilience is cultivated among tourism practitioners and communities whose lives and livelihoods are have been placed in limbo. Drawing on literature at the intersection of critical tourism studies and resilience theory as well as interviews with local tourism practitioners and academics, four historically situated and place-based trends in Southeast Asia that are reshaping tourism in the region are outlined: livelihood diversification, ecosystem regeneration, cultural revitalization, and domestic tourism development. These trends highlight how the political economy of tourism in …

A Landscape-Level Assessment Of Restoration Resource Allocation For The Eastern Monarch Butterfly, Rodrigo Solis-Sosa, Arne Mooers, Maxim Larrivée, Sean Cox, Christina A.D. Semeniuk

Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research Publications

The Monarch butterfly eastern population (Danaus plexippus) is in decline primarily due to habitat loss. Current habitat restoration programs focus on re-establishing milkweed, the primary food resource for Monarch caterpillars, in the central United States of America. However, individual components of the Monarch life cycle function as part of an integrated whole. Here we develop the MOBU-SDyM, a migration-wide systems dynamics model of the Monarch butterfly migratory cycle to explore alternative management strategies’ impacts. Our model offers several advances over previous efforts, considering complex variables such as dynamic temperature-dependent developmental times, dynamic habitat availability, and weather-related mortality across the entire …

The Influence Of Microsite Conditions On Early Performance Of Planted Nothofagus Nitida Seedlings When Restoring Degraded Coastal Temperate Rain Forests, Jan R. Bannister, Manuel Acevedo, German Travieso, Andres Holz, Nicole Galindo

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Widespread impacts of changes in land use, climate, and disturbance regimes continue to affect mature forests and their subsequent post-disturbance recovery. In South American temperate rainforests, the recovery of the original composition, structure, and ecological services of now-degraded old-growth forests is additionally hampered by the aggressive competition that the native Chusquea bamboo understory exerts on juvenile trees, thus arresting ecological succession. In this study, we aim to evaluate the early performance of Nothofagus nitida seedlings (pioneer tree species that tolerate shade) planted beneath nurse canopy following removal of the understory, and to define which microsite conditions can facilitate N. nitida …

Effects Of Land Use In Nebraska On Insect Biodiversity And Eastern Monarch Populations, Carina Olivetti

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

How are Nebraska land use decisions affecting eastern monarch butterfly decline? What are the driving factors causing monarch decline? What are the challenges of insect monitoring and data organizing? The purpose of this exploratory research project was to investigate these questions and simultaneously illustrate the importance of insect biodiversity, focusing largely on the monarch butterfly. The eastern population of the monarch butterfly has declined 80% over the past two decades. The state of Nebraska lies within their migratory path and is therefore critical to their survival. The hypothesis is that monarch populations are declining because of the combined impacts of …

Advancing Applied Research In Conservation Criminology Through The Evaluation Of Corruption Prevention, Enhancing Compliance, And Reducing Recidivism, Jessica S. Kahler, Joseph W. Rivera, Zachary T. Steele, Pilar Morales-Giner, Christian J. Rivera, Carol F. Ahossin, Ashpreet Kaur, Diane J. Episcopio-Sturgeon

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Concomitant with an increase in the global illegal wildlife trade has been a substantial increase in research within traditional conservation-based sciences and conservation and green criminology. While the integration of criminological theories and methods into the wildlife conservation context has advanced our understanding of and practical responses to illegal wildlife trade, there remain discrepancies between the number of empirical vs. conceptual studies and a disproportionate focus on a few select theories, geographical contexts, and taxonomic groups. We present three understudied or novel applications of criminology and criminal justice research within the fields of fisheries, forestry, and wildlife conservation. First, we …

Artificial Intelligence For Social Impact: Learning And Planning In The Data-To-Deployment Pipeline, Andrew Perrault, Fei Fang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the maturing of artificial intelligence (AI) and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances toward addressing complex societal problems. In pursuit of this goal of AI for social impact, we as AI researchers must go beyond improvements in computational methodology; it is important to step out in the field to demonstrate social impact. To this end, we focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation, and public health in low-resource communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention …

Shared-Use Infrastructure Along The World’S Largest Iron Ore Operation: Lessons Learned From The Carajás Corridor, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Nicolas Maennling, Perrine Toledano, Edgar Santos Monteiro, Felipe Botelho Tavares

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

To be beneficial for a country’s development, non-renewable resource extraction should be leveraged to build long-term assets, such as infrastructure, that will support sustainable and inclusive growth. This is especially critical for countries facing an infrastructure-funding gap (e.g. the World Bank’s Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic has estimated that Africa faces an annual infrastructure funding gap of US$31 billion); leveraging extractive industry-related investment could help fill this gap. Historically, natural resource concessionaires have adopted an enclave approach to infrastructure development, providing their own power and transportation services to ensure that the basic infrastructure needed for their operations is reliably available.

Shared-Use …

Building Life-Cycle Carbon And Operational Energy Report, Duncan Cox, Alexandra Davis, Vamshe Gooje

General University of Maine Publications

The premise of this report is to surmise the embodied carbon impact and anticipated operational energy use of the 57,995 sf crosslaminated timber (CLT) and glulam addition to the Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) on the University of Maine campus. The project will contain open lab space for the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, offices, and a presentation venue.

A life-cycle assessment is a methodology for quantifying environmental impacts at all stages of a building’s life cycle. This is a cradle-to-grave assessment of the building, beginning from raw material extraction and sourcing, to manufacturing, transportation, construction, energy use, …

Rapidly Accelerating Deforestation In Cambodia's Mekong River Basin: A Comparative Analysis Of Spatial Patterns And Drivers, Sapana Lohani, Thomas E. Dilts, Peter J. Weisberg, Sarah E. Null, Zeb S. Hogan

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

The Mekong River is a globally important river system, known for its unique flood pulse hydrology, ecological productivity, and biodiversity. Flooded forests provide critical terrestrial nutrient inputs and habitat to support aquatic species. However, the Mekong River is under threat from anthropogenic stressors, including deforestation from land cultivation and urbanization, and dam construction that inundates forests and encourages road development. This study investigated spatio-temporal patterns of deforestation in Cambodia and portions of neighboring Laos and Vietnam that form the Srepok-Sesan-Sekong watershed. A random forest model predicted tree cover change over a 25-year period (1993-2017) using the Landsat satellite archive. Then, …