A Global Analysis of Deforestation in Moist Tropical Forest Protected Areas.

Protected areas (PAs) have been established to conserve tropical forests, but their effectiveness at reducing deforestation is uncertain. To explore this issue, we combined high resolution data of global forest loss over the period 2000-2012 with data on PAs. For each PA we quantified forest loss within the PA, in buffer zones 1, 5, 10 and 15 km outside the PA boundary as well as a 1 km buffer within the PA boundary. We analysed 3376 tropical and subtropical moist forest PAs in 56 countries over 4 continents. We found that 73% of PAs experienced substantial deforestation pressure, with >0.1% a-1 forest loss in the outer 1 km buffer. Forest loss within PAs was greatest in Asia (0.25% a-1) compared to Africa (0.1% a-1), the Neotropics (0.1% a-1) and Australasia (Australia and Papua New Guinea; 0.03% a-1). We defined performance (P) of a PA as the ratio of forest loss in the inner 1 km buffer compared to the loss that would have occurred in the absence of the PA, calculated as the loss in the outer 1 km buffer corrected for any difference in deforestation pressure between the two buffers. To remove the potential bias due to terrain, we analysed a subset of PAs (n = 1804) where slope and elevation in inner and outer 1 km buffers were similar (within 1° and 100 m, respectively). We found 41% of PAs in this subset reduced forest loss in the inner buffer by at least 25% compared to the expected inner buffer forest loss (P<0.75). Median performance ([Formula: see text]) of subset reserves was 0.87, meaning a reduction in forest loss within the PA of 13%. We found PAs were most effective in Australasia ([Formula: see text]), moderately successful in the Neotropics ([Formula: see text]) and Africa ([Formula: see text]), but ineffective in Asia ([Formula: see text]). We found many countries have PAs that give little or no protection to forest loss, particularly in parts of Asia, west Africa and central America. Across the tropics, the median effectiveness of PAs at the national level improved with gross domestic product per capita. Whilst tropical and subtropical moist forest PAs do reduce forest loss, widely varying performance suggests substantial opportunities for improved protection, particularly in Asia

Computing supersingular isogenies on Kummer surfaces

We apply Scholten\u27s construction to give explicit isogenies between the Weil restriction of supersingular Montgomery curves with full rational 2-torsion over $GF(p^2)$ and corresponding abelian surfaces over $GF(p)$. Subsequently, we show that isogeny-based public key cryptography can exploit the fast Kummer surface arithmetic that arises from the theory of theta functions. In particular, we show that chains of 2-isogenies between elliptic curves can instead be computed as chains of Richelot (2,2)-isogenies between Kummer surfaces. This gives rise to new possibilities for efficient supersingular isogeny-based cryptography

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations 1–6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories 7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1-6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth's 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world's most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees

Faster Pairing Computation on Jacobi Quartic Curves with High-Degree Twists

In this paper, we first propose a geometric approach to explain the group law on Jacobi quartic curves which are seen as the intersection of two quadratic surfaces in space. Using the geometry interpretation we construct Miller function. Then we present explicit formulae for the addition and doubling steps in Miller&apos;s algorithm to compute the Tate pairing on Jacobi quartic curves. Our formulae on Jacobi quartic curves are better than previously proposed ones for the general case of even embedding degree. Finally, we present efficient formulas for Jacobi quartic curves with twists of degree 4 or 6. Our pairing computation on Jacobi quartic curves are faster than the pairing computation on Weier-strass curves when j = 1728. The addition steps of our formulae are fewer than the addition steps on Weierstrass curves when j = 0.EICPCI-S(ISTP)[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Efficient Optimal Ate Pairing at 128-bit Security Level

International audienceFollowing the emergence of Kim and Barbulescu's new number field sieve (exTNFS) algorithm at CRYPTO'16 [21] for solving discrete logarithm problem (DLP) over the finite field; pairing-based cryptography researchers are intrigued to find new parameters that confirm standard security levels against exTNFS. Recently, Barbulescu and Duquesne have suggested new parameters [3] for well-studied pairing-friendly curves i.e., Barreto-Naehrig (BN) [5], Barreto-Lynn-Scott (BLS-12) [4] and Kachisa-Schaefer-Scott (KSS-16) [19] curves at 128-bit security level (twist and subgroup attack secure). They have also concluded that in the context of Optimal-Ate pairing with their suggested parameters , BLS-12 and KSS-16 curves are more efficient choices than BN curves. Therefore, this paper selects the atypical and less studied pairing-friendly curve in literature, i.e., KSS-16 which offers quartic twist, while BN and BLS-12 curves have sextic twist. In this paper, the authors optimize Miller's algorithm of Optimal-Ate pairing for the KSS-16 curve by deriving efficient sparse multiplication and implement them. Furthermore , this paper concentrates on the Miller's algorithm to experimentally verify Barbulescu et al.'s estimation. The result shows that Miller's algorithm time with the derived pseudo 8-sparse multiplication is most efficient for KSS-16 than other two curves. Therefore, this paper defends Barbulescu and Duquesne's conclusion for 128-bit security