Tropical rain forests

The management of the tropical rain forests (TRF) under the tenets of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) is beset with  a range of issues, particularly on its general lack of compliance with the reduced impact logging (RIL) specifications, conservation of biodiversity as well as the protection of soils, water resources, local forest-dependent communities, and the environment as a whole. An unsound management of the forests had always been blamed for the frequent natural disasters and climate change that had befallen many countries that were hitherto endowed with  vast rich TRF resources. The poor planning stemming from lack of baseline data has led to poor execution of field operations and a wanton disregard for mitigation measures to minimize damage to the residual resource and the environment.  This  paper (power-point presentation) discusses on the issue of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) that had been made mandatory in many countries as a major input to the SFM of the invaluable TRF.

The oligarchy hypothesis proposes that large areas of Amazonian plant communities are dominated by limited sets of species. We tested this hypothesis by (1) quantifying dominance of the 10 most common species, genera and families in each region; and (2) assessing the consistency of relative abundance ranks between areas and across scales in dominance patterns for trees and lianas in two distant Amazonian regions (∼1900 km), the Yasuní and Madidi National Parks in Ecuador and Bolivia, respectively. The analyses were based on sixty-nine 0.1-ha plots in which all woody plants with a diameter at breast height (dbh) ≥2.5 cm were inventoried (19 775 individuals and 1729 species in total). The plots were located at two Yasuní and five Madidi sites, with an average of 10 plots per site. Overall, oligarchic dominance was pronounced at all the spatial scales investigated, although decreasing with increasing scale. Cross-scale relative abundance ranks were more consistent in Yasuní than in Mad...