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Data were gathered on demographic, forest‐related and geographic parameters to understand the pattern of forest cover change in the Indian subcontinent and discern any underlying factors contributing to forest cover change. Observations indicated that the marginal worker force in many states influences the forest cover change. The states with a lower percentage of forest cover to their geographical area undertook large‐scale plantation activity to enhance the forest cover in the state. Incidentally, these states also had a higher proportion of marginal worker population to their total population. However, the states with high proportion of forest area had a lower proportion of marginal worker population, indicating there is a relation between the proportion of marginal workers in the population to the proportion of forest cover in the state. Thus, a proportion of population that is mostly dependent on the forest for its livelihood in some part of the year becomes unemployed if forests are denuded. Concludes that the forest in a given locality enhances employment opportunity for the local people for their livelihood sustenance. Therefore the policy initiatives should look into employment generation opportunity, apart from enhancing forest cover and regeneration of these forests.

Water supply is closely linked to forests. In developing countries, especially those in the tropics, large forest areas are cut down for timber, agriculture and industries. The effect of deforestation on water sources could be examined through the study of the correlation between of the size of the forest clearing area and the size of the water in the dam and also the correlation between the size of the forest area and the size of the water area in the dam. Reports the finding of a study on the effect of deforestation of catchment areas and the ability of dams to sustain water during the dry season. Analyses images of the catchment areas obtained for nine consecutive years by satellites. The findings show that there is a negative correlation between the size of the forest clearing and the size of the water area in the dam and a positive correlation between the size of the forest areas and the size of the water areas.

This paper aims to examine the effects of the use of environmental easements and forest certification on the output of ecosystems services from private forestlands in the USA.

The discussion of the changes in ownership and management of private forest lands in the USA is based on a review of the literature, the degree of recent activity in the innovative changes, and an assessment of the extent of ownership and management changes.

The use of environmental easements, resulting from ownership changes, and forest certification have facilitated, indeed mandated, forest management that is consistent with an increase in the provision of environmental and ecosystem services from private forests. The rapid expansion of environmental easements has been accommodated by the dramatic changes in forest ownership patterns in the USA, as traditional corporate ownerships have sold off large land areas to other private ownership types. Forest certification, which provides for improved management of ecosystem services, also has expanded rapidly in recent years.

This study suggests forest management to provide environmental and ecosystem services can be achieve through environmental easements and forest certification. These changes can occur as the result of environmental interests entering forest land markets and affixing easements to the land. This finding suggests an alternative to the approach to establishing separate markets for ecosystem services, as is often suggested, and requires no increased governmental actions or new regulations. Rather these improvements are driven by voluntary forest certification and/or environmental groups entering the private markets for forest lands.

This study suggests an alternative to the commonly held notion that separate markets for environmental and ecosystem services are required to increased their outputs. Rather, environmental easements and voluntary certification, in the face of changing ownership can provide the incentives for management changes that increase the outputs of environment and ecosystem services.

In answer to the urgent need to adapt conservation strategies and approaches to climate change, the purpose of this paper is to locate the climatically stable forests in West and Central Africa and to assess whether they overlap with the existing network of protected areas and if not, to prioritize them for protection.

With ongoing global warming, rain forest will survive where locally soil moisture content remains high compensating for the regional drought stress. As a proxy for a soil moisture‐driven model, rainfall >2,000 mm, altitude >500 m and strong relief (standard deviation in elevation data pixels) were overlapped in a GIS analysis to locate the climatically stable forest within the present continuous forest of Central Africa and within the degraded forest of West Africa. As a means of verification, the biodiversity was measured in and outside the identified areas in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as high levels of biodiversity are related to the survival and stability of the forest in the past. Biodiversity was calculated (measured as Fisher‐α diversity) for all trees (dbh >5 cm) on 66 transects (200 × 5 m).

The forest areas identified as climatically stable in the GIS analysis showed a higher biodiversity than the forest outside these areas (student T‐test: P<0.000035, stable = 54.7 and unstable = 33.7), supporting the validity of the model. Mapping the results of the GIS query showed that most of the climatically stable forests in West and Central Africa are located outside the park systems, and that it is already too late to protect the climatically stable forest in West Africa as almost nothing is left of it.

Wedged in between large‐scale drought tolerant ecosystems the African rain forest is most vulnerable to global climate change. Knowing which parts are climatically stable and resilient helps to set and focus conservation priorities and efforts. This approach is a powerful tool which has helped to identify areas with a high‐conservation priority in Africa.

In a tropical country like Malaysia, forest fire is a very common natural and man‐made disaster that prevails in the whole South East Asian region throughout the year. Recently, the haze problem in Malaysia has created a lot of awareness among the government and eco‐tourism sectors. Therefore, detection of the hotspot is very important to delineate the forest fire susceptibility mapping. In this study, remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) have been used to evaluate forest fire susceptibility at Sungai Karang and Raja Muda Musa Forest Reserve, Selangor, Malaysia. Frequency ratio model has been applied for the delineation of forest fire mapping for the study area.

Forest fire locations were identified in the study area from historical hotspots data from year 2000 to 2005 using AVHRR NOAA 12 and NOAA 16 satellite images. Various other supported data such as soil map, topographic data, and agro climate were collected and created using GIS. These data were constructed into a spatial database using GIS. The factors that influence fire occurrence, such as fuel type and Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI), were extracted from classified Landsat‐7 ETM imagery. Slope and aspect of topography were calculated from topographic database. Soil type was extracted from soil database and dry month code from agroclimate data. Forest fire susceptibility was analyzed using the forest fire occurrence factors by likelihood ratio method.

A new statistical method has been applied for the forest fire susceptibility mapping. The results of the analysis were verified using forest fire location data with the help of a newly written programming code. The validation results show satisfactory agreement between the susceptibility map and the existing data on forest fire location. The GIS was used to analyze the vast amount efficiently, and statistical programs were used to maintain the specificity and accuracy. The result can be used for early warning, fire suppression resources planning and allocation.

All data used in this study are original. The forest fire susceptibility mapping has been done in this study area for the first time. A new program has been coded to cross‐verify the susceptibility map. The results were also verified with field data and other supporting weather data.

Forests should be thought of not merely as “timber”, but also as treasuries of plants and animals as well as “green reservoirs”. The preservation and management of montane forests are therefore of importance. Different ways should be adopted according to the corresponding conditions of four montane forest regions of China. Afforestation in the humid eastern plains and southern rolling hills should be paid great attention, because these areas have much more rainfall, deep and fertile soil and sufficient atmospheric heat. Protection forests planted on farmlands and along the southeastern seaboard not only raise the output of crops, but also provide timber, fuel and forage. It is necessary to strengthen the rewarding utilisation system of forest resources. The current irrational remuneration of afforestation workers and forest engineering workers doing similar jobs but for different wages must be changed.

Emerging evidence revealed a high rate of dependence of marginal people on forest resources in developing countries for both subsistence use and cash income. The purpose of this paper is to examine the rural livelihoods welfare dimensions of community forest income in south-western Nigeria.

Forest activities and income pattern data were collected from 160 rural households’ selected using multistage sampling approach. Descriptive statistics and Gini decomposition technique were used to analyse the data.

The result shows that forest income accounts for about 38.2 per cent of total household income and was the first ranked source of income in the study area. The Gini decomposition analysis showed that access to forest income is income inequality reducing in the study area. The study findings suggests that household welfare in rural Nigeria could be improved through policies and programmes that can stimulate sustainable access to forest resources and assist households to earn income from alternative sources such as agriculture.

The result of the study helped provide information on the uses and benefits of community forests as it affects the well-being of rural people. Also, it provides the benchmark for policy makers, government agencies and NGO's involved in rural livelihood outcome of forest communities.

Currently, there is a conflict in developing countries between the requirements for the self-development of forestry and the insufficient investment in the forestry sector, and the forest ticket system is an innovative forestry management method to solve this contradiction. In the research on the forest ticket system, the study of its price formation mechanism is relatively important. The key issues of the forest ticket system are how to form the forest ticket price and whether the forest ticket pricing methods are reasonable. Solving these problems is the purpose of this study.

This study will use three methods, namely the forest ecosystem service value evaluation index method, the ecosystem service value based on per unit area evaluation method and the contingent valuation method, to study the forest ticket price formation mechanism, filling the gap in the current research on forest ticket pricing methods. It will analyze how these three pricing methods specifically price the forest ticket and evaluate whether these pricing methods are reasonable. This study will then summarize and comprehensively study the forest ticket price formation mechanism and provide policy recommendations for decision-making departments.

The contingent valuation method and the forest ecosystem service value evaluation index method should be mainly used and given priority in the forest ticket pricing process. When the forest ticket is mainly issued for local residents' willingness to compensate for the forestry ecological value, the contingent valuation method should be mainly considered; when the forest ticket is mainly issued for compensating for the ecological value of local used forest land, the forest ecosystem service value evaluation index method should be mainly considered. The ecosystem service value based on per unit area evaluation method does not need to be the focus.

Compared with existing research studies, which focus more on the forest ticket system itself and the definition of forest ticket, this study mainly focuses on the forest ticket price formation mechanism, emphasizing how to form the forest ticket price and whether the forest ticket pricing methods are reasonable, which has a certain degree of innovation and research value and can partially fill the gap in related fields. At the same time, this study has certain help for the enrichment of the forest ticket system and the extension of related research studies.

The problem of image retrieval and image description exists in various fields. In this paper, a model of content-based image retrieval and image content extraction based on the KD-Tree structure was proposed.

A Random Forest structure was built to classify the objects on each image on the basis of the balanced multibranch KD-Tree structure. From that purpose, a KD-Tree structure was generated by the Random Forest to retrieve a set of similar images for an input image. A KD-Tree structure is applied to determine a relationship word at leaves to extract the relationship between objects on an input image. An input image content is described based on class names and relationships between objects.

A model of image retrieval and image content extraction was proposed based on the proposed theoretical basis; simultaneously, the experiment was built on multi-object image datasets including Microsoft COCO and Flickr with an average image retrieval precision of 0.9028 and 0.9163, respectively. The experimental results were compared with those of other works on the same image dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A balanced multibranch KD-Tree structure was built to apply to relationship classification on the basis of the original KD-Tree structure. Then, KD-Tree Random Forest was built to improve the classifier performance and retrieve a set of similar images for an input image. Concurrently, the image content was described in the process of combining class names and relationships between objects.

At present, China’s forestry development is mainly driven by the traditional production factors such as forestry labor force, land resources and capital and thus the top priority of forestry development is to optimize forestry production factors. Scientific and effective forestry labor input has a significant role in promoting the development of forestry industry. Given that the actual input to forestry labor is not clear, the accuracy of the forestry industry development may be slightly affected. Based on the monitoring project of collective forest tenure reform (RCFT), this paper uses the survey data of 3,500 rural households in seven provinces of China from 2010 to 2014 and 2016 to 2017 to measure the actual labor force in China, and empirically analyzes and studies the factors influencing the development of forestry industry based on the provincial data of forestry in China, and further discusses the heterogeneous impact of forestry production factors on the development of forestry industry.

In this paper, the generalized least squares estimation model is used to calculate the actual number of forestry labor in China, and then the Cobb–Douglas production function is selected to explore the influencing factors of forestry industry development.

The results show that the actual number of forestry labor force in China continues to decline and the degree of reduction varies from different regions. The forestry labor is a major factor that promotes the development of the forestry industry, but this promotion is affected by the low matching degree between the forestry production factors and thus further inhibits the development of the forestry industry. Due to the time lag of the reform, the implementation of RCFT first weakens and then promotes the development of forestry production. Further on, the forestry labor input is heterogeneous in land resource endowment, forestry investment source and the proportion of management personnel.

Therefore, researches show that the feasible way to promote the development of forestry industry is to expand the scale of forestry labor force, optimize the mutual allocation of forestry production factors, enhance the input of human capital in forestry and deepen the RCFT.