Protected areas and Community Forest Management (CFM) are among the most widespread interventions to conserve forests in tropical countries. In addition to their impacts on forests and the biodiversity they contain, these interventions also affect human well-being, particularly that of the local communities who are often poor and politically marginalized and whose livelihoods depend directly on the forest resources being conserved. To develop effective interventions, practitioners need to have credible, strong and scientifically rigorous evidence on their impacts on forests (or the biodiversity they contain) and human well-being. However, while cientifically rigorous impact evaluation of programs is well advanced in fields such as development, health and education, it is rare in nature conservation. The rare existing studies focus mostly on protected areas and other interventions, such as CFM, are relatively untouched by scientifically rigorous impact evaluation. Different challenges account for the limited adoption of rigorous impact evaluation in nature conservation. Among these are the identification and elimination of rival explanations: factors other than the intervention that can explain the observed relationship between the intervention and the outcome. Potential rival explanations are factors that can confound impact estimates by affecting both assignment of units to intervention and the outcome. Another potential rival explanation is baseline outcome data that should have been collected before the intervention was implemented. Baseline data are often missing in conservation studies. Another challenge is the heterogeneity of management practices within and units exposed to the same intervention. A challenge pertaining particularly to studies on human well-being impacts is the multi-dimensional nature of human well-being. In this thesis, I aim to investigate the impacts of different conservation interventions on environmental and human well-being outcomes while addressing the challenges to conservation impact evaluation discussed above. My case studies are CFM and strict protection in Madagascar; one of the world’s hottest biodiversity hotspots. I have three specific objectives which are addressed in three manuscripts with the following titles: i) Effectiveness of CFM at reducing deforestation across Madagascar (manuscript 1): With colleagues, I investigated the impacts of CFM on deforestation at the national scale between 2000 and 2010 using matching to control for factors confounding impact estimates. We did not detect an impact of CFM, on average, when CFM areas were compared to non-CFM areas, even when the sample was restricted to only where information suggests effective CFM implementation on the ground. However, impacts were heterogeneous conditional on whether CFM permits commercial use of forest resources. No CFM impact was detected where commercial use of natural resources is allowed. However, we did detect some reduction of deforestation in areas managed under CFM that does not permit commercial use, when compared to non-CFM or CFM permitting commercial use. Our findings suggest differentiating among types of CFM is important for estimating the impacts of this conservation approach. ii) Impacts of CFM on human economic well-being across Madagascar (manuscript 2): In this manuscript, we investigated impacts on household living standards across Madagascar as measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We used matching to control for confounding factors and addressed the issue of missing baseline values of household consumption expenditures using an approach known as the placebo test. We cannot statistically reject the hypothesis of zero impact, but we can credibly reject the hypothesis that CFM has had substantial negative impacts on economic well-being across CFM communities in Madagascar. There were heterogeneous impacts, with a mixture of positive and negative impacts, conditional on household proximity to forest and education level. In conclusion, the impacts of CFM vary with household characteristics: some may lose while others may gain. iii) The potential of the Global Person Generated Index (GPGI) for evaluating the perceived impact of conservation interventions on subjective well-being (manuscript 3): In this study, we used the GPGI, a subjective and multidimensional well-being instrument, to investigate the relative impacts of strict protection and CFM on human well-being in sites in eastern Madagascar. We used a participatory approach to establish the cause-effect relationship between the interventions and the outcomes (i.e., to eliminate rival explanations). We did not detect statistically significant difference, on average, between the two approaches in three measures we used to examine the magnitude of their relative impacts on subjective well-being. However, we found some differences in the characteristics of subjective well-being component domains impacted by the strict protection and CFM and in the priority domains that could be targeted by increased resource allocation to improve well-being in locally meaningful ways. Combined with the participatory approach to establish cause-effect relationship, we suggest GPGI provides highly relevant insight that can be used to design policy seeking to increase local participation and develop more positive local attitudes towards conservation. The first two manuscripts (1 and 2) involve analyses at the national scale, objective indicators (deforestation and consumption expenditure) and rigorous quantitative causal inference designs making them of value to external stakeholders, such as government agencies and donors, seeking to know the magnitude of impacts to inform large scale conservation policy. However, these large scale studies may be of limited use for project managers who want to build locally legitimate interventions or those who want a deeper understanding of how conservation interventions affect local people. In the third manuscript, we used a subjective measure of well-being (the GPGI) in combination with participatory approach to establish cause-effect relationship between interventions and locally meaningful outcomes. This has limited value for quantitatively measuring the magnitude of impacts; but holds some promises for project managers who seek local participation and social sustainability. Conservation has long suffered from poor quality evaluation of its impacts. This thesis shows that methods for impact evaluation are available, but the appropriate method that should be applied depends, among other things, on the purpose of the evaluation.

Human activities have modified a significant part of the tropical forest landscapes across the globe, affecting their ecological characteristics and their capacity to provide ecosystem services. In order to counter act the current decrease in tropical forest quality, avoiding and reversing forest degradation has been included as one of the goals of multiple international agreements; it is of particular importance for the climate change mitigation scheme for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, forest conservation and enhancement of carbon stocks known as REDD+. In this thesis, I investigated the challenges and feasibility of measuring and monitoring tropical forest degradation in human modified landscapes, focusing on two types of human activities: shifting cultivation and logging. In Chapter 2, I built a conceptual framework that analyses the applicability of the international definitions of forest degradation, and their contrast with the complexity of tropical forest ecosystems and monitoring capacity in tropical countries. I proposed that given the current data and technological limitations, a quick start option to measure forest degradation is to use a benchmark that can be directly linked with the type and intensity of disturbance processes found in an area. Then in Chapter 3, I further studied disturbance processes by analysing the dynamics of shifting cultivation systems and the use of forest resources by communities. I found through a detailed mapping of high resolution data (10X10 m), that similar amounts of forest cover in tropical dry forests (TDF) were lost and gained between the study period (2004-2010), both at the regional and at the community level. This provides evidence that at least in terms of the above ground biomass pool, shifting cultivation systems in TDF could be considered carbon neutral, which implies that these systems have potential to participate in REDD+. The probability of changes in TDF cover in shifting cultivation systems was found to be dependent on the elevation, slope, amount of TDF available per person within a community, and to the amount of livestock and fence posts used by the communities. The use of forest resources and its relation with forest degradation is further studied in Chapter 4. In this Chapter, I evaluated a series of disturbance indicators that best explain the response of forest attributes to human disturbance, and used these indicators to establish four levels of forest degradation. The feasibility of separating four levels of degradation based on two types of high spatial resolution remote sensing data (SPOT 5 and RapidEye satellite data) was assessed. I found that at the landscape level, based on the use of forest resources it was possible to classify TDF into low and high degradation levels. The capacity to classify the landscape into disturbance levels is further explored in Chapter 5, by using historical logging concessions and multi-temporal time series of medium spatial resolution (Landsat) in tropical moist forest. Through the integration of previous land use information with an analysis of the relation of the amount of green vegetation with respect to soil and shadow that compose a pixel, I determined that almost one third of the forest in the study area has experienced disturbance processes. This work supports the need to advance monitoring of forest cover analysis by incorporating forest condition, which has particular implications for the determination of forest carbon stocks. Overall, this research strengthens the concept that the definition, measuring and monitoring of forest degradation should be tailored to the particular dynamics of disturbance processes; and moreover that a direct link between monitoring capacity of a country and policy formulation is clearly needed to improve tropical forest stewardship.

No description available.

Broadleaved forest habitat is important for a number of ecosystem functions and as a refuge for many rare plant species in human-modified landscapes. It is however, threatened by global change drivers such as deforestation and the associated fragmentation of remaining habitat areas, along with increased disturbance and exposure to nutrient inputs from surrounding intensive agriculture. This thesis uses a unique combination of data on plant species occurrence, local environmental conditions and forest spatial extent in order to investigate the ways in which species richness and functional diversity in forest communities are dependent upon local and landscape scale drivers, and to quantify the strength of these relationships. This provides novel understanding of the response of forest plants with different life history traits to the configuration and quality of available habitat, and therefore the way in which understorey assemblages are likely to alter over time following landscape change. Results highlight the importance of local environmental conditions within forest patches but also suggest that patch area and landscape connectivity have an important effect on the trait composition of communities. Preserving large, well connected areas of habitat is therefore likely to be key for the conservation of many species, particularly rarer forest specialists which often possess traits linked to low dispersal ability. Furthermore, there is evidence that species are slow to respond to changes in the spatial extent of habitat. As such, considering the history of forest patches is necessary in order to explain present day patterns in plant species occurrence and to devise effective conservation measures. This highlights the need to integrate understanding of local and landscape scale processes with temporal data in order to properly understand the way in which forest communities are formed and to predict ongoing change under expected global change scenarios.

Selective logging of tropical forests, particularly reduced impact logging (RIL), has long been suggested as a benign compromise between profitable land-use and biodiversity conservation. Throughout human history, slow-renewal biological resource populations have been predictably overexploited, often to extinction. This thesis examines the degree to which timber harvests beyond the first-cut can be financially profitable or demographically sustainable, both of which remain poorly understood. Data on legally planned logging of ~17.3 million m3 of timber were obtained from 824 government-approved private and community-based concession management plans. Results indicate that neither the post-depletion timber species composition nor total value of pre-harvest forest stands recover beyond the first-cut, suggesting that commercially most valuable timber species become predictably rare or economically extinct in old logging frontiers. Additionally, smallholders appear to exert strong high-grading pressure upon high-value hardwood species, thereby accruing higher gross revenue productivity per unit area and were more likely to inconsistently report areas of unlogged forest set-asides as required by Brazilian law. Selective logging leads to several forms of collateral damage (CD) to the residual forest stand. This pattern of structural disturbance is poorly quantified or understood despite representing a key form of forest degradation, or the second ‘D’ of REDD+ (United Nations Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). A review of studies on selective logging impacts on tropical forest fauna revealed that ~90% failed to at least report or attempt to quantify CD. This thesis also examined CD associated with a certified industrial-scale RIL operation of eastern Brazilian Amazonia and finds that for every harvested tree, there is an estimated loss of ~12 damaged stems (≥10cm DBH). Over 30% of total ground sampling area of logged forest was cleared within felled-trees impacts alone. Finally, using RIL concession data from an 11-year time series where ~0.34 million trees were harvested, we estimated the total biomass and carbon stock of harvested trees, their CD, and the infrastructure damage associated with roundlog removal. If only harvested trees and their associated CD are considered, the estimated cost incurred in sparing logging-induced forest degradation through carbon financing projects such as REDD+ could compensate for the ~393 US$ ha-1 yr-1 logging revenues accrued to concession owners.

This study examines the linkage between rural livelihoods and forest ecosystem services under different land uses in Miombo forest socio-ecological systems of Zambia to understand the potential for carbon-based payment for ecosystem service schemes. The research develops and adopts an integrated research methodology in a new framework for ecosystem assessment (FESA) that combines livelihood surveys, ecological surveys and policy analysis to provide an interdisciplinary, multi-level case study analysis. Findings show that forest provisioning ecosystem services (FPES) are vitally important to rural livelihoods as a source of food, medicine, construction material and fodder, and make the highest contribution to household income among diverse livelihood strategies. FPES provided 43.9% of the average household’s income and contributed a 10% income equalisation effect among study households, as revealed by the Gini-coefficient analysis. Poorer households received a lower mean annual income from forests than did their intermediate and wealthy counterparts, but in relative terms, forest income made the greatest contribution to their total household incomes. The study indicates that wealth, rather than gender, was the key determinant of a household’s engagement in the sale of FPES. Results also show that households face multiple shocks and that FPES are the most widely used coping strategy used by households facing idiosyncratic shocks such as illness, death of family members and loss of household assets which changes household consumption patterns. In terms of carbon storage, the study shows that Miombo woodlands are an important carbon store and that carbon storage can recover quickly through regeneration of cleared forests. After forest clearance for charcoal production and slash and burn agriculture, aboveground carbon stocks accumulate rapidly showing no significant differences in carbon stocks between undisturbed woodlands and ≥ 20 year old fallows. Findings however indicate low species similarities suggesting that though Miombo systems recover relatively fast in terms of carbon storage, species composition and biodiversity takes longer to recuperate. Findings of this research show a lack of multi-stakeholder involvement in forest governance, which is hindered by the absence of legislation to ensure stakeholder participation and cost and benefit sharing mechanisms. Policy analysis show inconsistencies between Zambia’s national agricultural, forestry, energy and climate change policies and national statements to multilateral environmental agreements in efforts to address forest loss. Additionally, although national statements to Rio Conventions share common ground on measures to address deforestation, they are poorly mainstreamed into national policies and broader development policies at national level. The agricultural policy’s focus on expanding agricultural land by providing fiscal incentives and subsidised credit provides incentives for deforestation, indicating negative horizontal interaction with the forest policy, while the mutually supportive link through conservation farming is poorly developed. A more holistic landscape management approach would be useful to bridge sectoral divides. A research contribution to the evidence and knowledge base for forests and rural livelihoods is made by this thesis, and empirical findings are detailed on how socio-economic differentiation affects contribution of Miombo FPES to total livelihood portfolios and household incomes. This analysis feeds into broader debates on forest conservation and development by linking FPES and livelihood strategies, which is important in designing long-term forest management strategies and providing national/international policy guidance for similar socio-economic contexts. This study further provides new understanding of the opportunity that carbon storage can bring to increasing financial gains from ecosystem services in local communities who practice slash and burn cultivation and charcoal production, once the carbon stores/changes in the recovery trajectory are established and monitoring schemes initiated. This study makes an applied contribution to forest-based climate change mitigation initiatives such as REDD+ debates by providing a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges of its implementation in view of Miombo woodland use for livelihoods, improved ecological understanding and current policy discourses that converge in the forest sector.

Designing and implementing the Reduced Emissions from Avoided Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) depend on mutually interlinked actors, policies and socioeconomic factors across global, national and local levels. Unpacking the interaction between REDD+ design and implementation processes could holistically identify sources of institutional impediments to the programme’s effectiveness in the context of sustainable development. This thesis examines the process of designing REDD+ rules at the global level and the implementation of these rules at the national and local levels in Kenya. The study develops and applies an integrated institutions and development analytical framework (IDAF) within which iterative document analysis, quantitative vulnerability indexing, project inventories and interviews are applied to gather empirical evidence. Results reveal that multilevel institutional impediments face REDD+ design and implementation. At the global level, resource endowment determines actors’ ability to design and implement methodological, financial and safeguard design rules for REDD+. However, due to resource limitation and reliance on REDD+ funds, the input of African States into the technical and institutional REDD+ design is weak. This creates gaps in technical capacity and funding required for implementing the global rules at the national level. In Kenya, the national implementation relies on expertise and funds from multilateral intermediaries but this support plays into national institutional gaps e.g. path dependency and sectoral competition for funds to create implementation deficits. Efforts to avoid ‘institutional complexities’ in delivering carbon funds confine REDD+ activities within the State-based forestry sector but exclude key land use sectors such as lands and agriculture. This sectorial exclusion subdues cross-sectorial expertise required for REDD+ implementation but most importantly, fails to attend to underlying drivers of deforestation such as resettlement and agricultural mechanisation. Even though delivery of carbon and associated funds are emphasised at the global/national levels, local level implementation of the Kasigau project relies more on delivery of pro-poor livelihoods that keep the poor out of forests. Benefit sharing mechanism with regards to livelihoods is a key source of interplay between REDD+ design and on-ground implementation but this interplay is a source of certain institutional conflicts: first, the interplay complicates multilevel institutional arrangements for REDD+. For supporting local livelihood needs, the local community favourably perceives the private actor implementing the Kasigau project but negatively perceives State regimes that have historically monopolised local resource decisions and benefits. This raises concerns as to whether the State, as the legitimate representative of local communities’ interests in REDD+, can ably do so as expected by the UNFCCC. Second, the interplay elicits carbon-livelihood tension. Projects avoid investing/implementation within poor communities whose livelihood status could complicate delivery of carbon funds. Projects target relatively richer areas endowed with humid forest resources at 0.728; p<0.01, land title deeds at 0.552; p<0.01 and better access to water at 0.475; p<0.01. This raises concerns about emission leakage when deforestation shifts to forests hosted in poorer communities. Carbon-livelihood tension also renders equitable and pro-poor strategies in REDD+ ineffective. Strict carbon standards limit trade-offs between pro-poor livelihoods and forest protection especially when fluctuating carbon prices constrain funds needed for project operations and local livelihoods. This study presents one of the first multilevel scientific analyses of REDD+ and contributes empirical evidence to literature on REDD+ governance. It reveals that the main sources of REDD+ implementation deficits emanate from the global and national institutional processes. As such, ensuring equity and rights in REDD+ implementation is necessary but not sufficient for effective REDD+ implementation unless national level institutions are reformed and global carbon conditions and pricing harmonised with local livelihood needs.

No description available.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are utilized for improved mapping of forest cover and biophysical retrieval due to its sensitivity to forest canopy and structure. It is important to study the forest structure and biophysical parameters because it constitutes the major forest aboveground biomass (AGB). The S-band SAR frequency has not been consistently investigated for forest monitoring due to the lack of long-term data. Using the recent AirSAR campaign (2010-2014) over Savernake Forest and Wytham Woods in southern England, this thesis presents methods for analysing S-band SAR data for soil and forest canopies using the radiative transfer Michigan Microwave Canopy Scattering (MIMICS-I) model. The first result chapter shows that dominant scattering behaviour of S-band frequency arises from ground/trunk interactions with little direct crown scattering across all polarisations and incidence angles. The S-band backscatter shows significant sensitivity to both soil moisture content and surface roughness. Simulation experiments related to forest degradation show low co-polarisation backscatter due to reduced canopy component and tree density at S-band. Using the above information, the second result chapter shows that S-band HH- and VV-backscatter and Radar Forest Degradation Index (RFDI) data produces forest/non-forest classification map at 6 m resolution with 70% overall accuracy (kappa coefficient, κ = 0.41) while 63% overall accuracy (kappa coefficient, κ = 0.27) for the 20 m resolution map in a Maximum Likelihood algorithm. S-band data is also useful for mapping various non-forest cover types and monitoring forest cover changes over time due to the loss of volume scattering when forest canopies are removed. Using the field measured forest biomass, the third result chapter reveals that S-band radar backscatter correlates well with forest AGB. A consistent S-band backscatter/ biomass relationship is found, suggesting increasing backscatter sensitivity to forest AGB up to 100 t/ha with least error varying 90.46 - 98.65 t/ha at 25 m resolution (stand level) in low to medium incidence angles. The implications of these results are that S-band SAR data like the longer L-band SAR is highly suitable for mapping forest cover and monitoring cover changes and be able to retrieve low biomass stands below 100 t/ha.

Deforestation is a process which has attracted considerable scientific interest in remote sensing and successful paradigms of detecting and monitoring have been presented; however, forest degradation in general is a more complicated case the detection of which presents significant challenges (Herold et al. 2011). Countries have been measuring current rates of degradation with field data and remote sensing imagery. Despite the fact that it is well evident that a combination of these two types of data provides the strongest capabilities (Herold et al. 2011), data on rates and processes of degradation are currently not available for many forested systems and information about factors influencing forest degradation is still limited in developing countries. Therefore, in these cases when assessing degradation they are forced to rely strongly on remote sensing approaches supported by any available field assessments of forest degradation. This research investigates the potential of TerraSAR-X remote sensing satellite images combines with field observations to detect and analyse forest degradation in a tropical forested area in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Several speckle noise filters have been tested and the Gamma MAP filter technique with a 7x7 window size is proposed as the best for this case study. Processes leading to classification, TerraSAR-X data (HH/HV and VV/VH dual polarizations) pre-processed with the proposed filter are used to classify logging tracks using feature extraction techniques. The results show that Example-Based classification method is a powerful technique to detect and map logging trails clearly while the same task is not addressed equally well by the Rule Based Feature extraction method. Furthermore, degraded areas, such as non-woody vegetation, logging trails, burned or logged forest were mapped using a combinations of classification algorithms applied on fused datasets from Landsat 5 TM and dual polarized (HH/HV and VV/VH) TerraSAR-X images; it was found that the fusion of SAR data with TerraSAR-X performed better in degraded areas than only TerraSAR-X dual polarization. Based on the backscatter coefficient and in-situ data the potential of SAR data to estimate biomass is evaluated. TerraSAR-X backscatter at HV polarization (R² = 0.413) outperforms in the study area when classifying logged areas, non-woody vegetation and intact classes. Comprehensively, this study demonstrates the potential of short-wavelength satellite radar to detect and characterise the processes of forest degradation from space.