Forests

The Anthropocene draws attention to how humans have increasingly shaped forests in the past, how forest loss and forest planting play a key role in today’s climate emergency, and how we think about forests and forest stewardship in the future. In this handbook entry I review the human moulding of forests, both constructive and destructive, since prehistoric times and suggest a conceptualization that explicitly incorporates human elements among the many processes constituting forests

Forest transitions: a new conceptual scheme

“Forest transitions” have recently received much attention, particularly in the hope that the historical transitions from net deforestation to forest recovery documented in several temperate countries might be repro- duced in tropical countries. The analysis of forest transitions, however, has struggled with questions of forest definition and has at times focussed purely on tree cover, irrespective of tree types (e.g. native forest or exotic plantations). Furthermore, it has paid little attention to how categories and definitions of forest are used to polit- ical effect or shape how forest change is viewed. In this paper, I propose a new heuristic model to address these lacunae, building on a conception of forests as distinct socio-ecological relationships between people, trees, and other actors that maintain and threaten the forest. The model draws on selected work in the forest transition, land change science, and critical social science literatures. It explicitly forces analysts to see forests as much more than a land cover statistic, particularly as it internalizes consideration of forest characteristics and the dif- ferential ways in which forests are produced and thought about. The new heuristic model distinguishes between four component forest transitions: transitions in quantitative forest cover (FT1); in characteristics like species composition or density (FT2); in the ecological, socio-economic, and political processes and relationships that constitute particular forests (FT3); and in forest ideologies, discourses, and stories (FT4). The four are inter- linked; the third category emerges as the linchpin. An analysis of forest transformations requires attention to diverse social and ecological processes, to power-laden official categories and classifications, and to the dis- courses and tropes by which people interpret these changes. Diverse examples are used to illustrate the model components and highlight the utility of considering the four categories of forest transitions

Political ecology and resilience: competing interdisciplinarities?

Both “political ecology” and “resilience” (or socio-ecological systems) are research approaches that explicitly claim to be inter- or even post-disciplinary. Both of these “interdisciplines” are currently dominant in academic study of society-environment interactions, engaging sizeable communities of students and scholars drawn from a range of traditional disciplines. Both approaches seeks to facilitate the kinds of boundary crossings that are crucial at the interface of nature and society, leading to new insights and knowledge, and to solving problems that are not contained within the boundaries. Yet there are inevitably pressures to “discipline” the new “interdisciplines”. In the case of political ecology and resilience, each has separate intellectual traditions, with some fundamental differences in purpose, in epistemology, in explanatory tools, and in ideology – illustrating that there are multiple ways of being interdisciplinary. This chapter explores these differences and reflects on the meaning of interdisciplinarity

The Shifting Place of Australian Acacia Species Around the World: Adoption, Uses and Perceptions

From ornamentals and rehabilitators to resources and invaders, Australian Acacia species (‘wattles’) have assumed diverse roles over time in the varied landscapes to which they have been introduced. The reception of these species – linked to how they are used, peoples’ perceptions about the trees’ and shrubs’ place in particular a landscape, and the environmental and socio-economic context – changes over time. In a context where wattles are sometimes important economic resources, sometimes subject to concerns over invasion, and where the climate emergency leads to pushes for rapid tree planting, the question is raised of how the place of wattles in human landscapes may evolve into the future. We sought to identify recent trends in how wattles are welcomed (or not), used (or not) and managed (or not) by people around the world. A conceptual model is proposed to understand how and why wattles are adopted and perceived differently in different places; this highlights moments of large, rapid, irreversible and systemic change, or regime shifts. We undertook a limited global online survey involving 72 respondents with knowledge on different wattle landscapes. Respondents were asked about changes in wattle extent, use, impact, perception and management over the past 10–15 years. We found that wat- tle social-ecological systems are dynamic: respondents reported more change than stability. They noted more wattle expansion than shrinkage; a number of increased uses; mostly amplifications (and some reductions) of previously reported impacts, both good and bad; generally increased awareness of invasions; and they commented on a number of management efforts both for forestry and for invasion control. Some changes are major and irreversible, such as the conversion over two decades of at least 6% of Vietnam’s land area to wattle plantations and accompanying institutional, economic, social and ecological shifts. Others are more incremental and perhaps reversible, such as public perception of environmental risks linked to wattles. Trends are different across the main regions reported on, namely South Africa, Europe and South-East Asia

Refining historical burned area data from satellite observations

• The burned area reported by global satellite products is largely biased. •We aimed to correct burned area biases before Sentinel-2 era. •A solution is to combine coarse resolution burned area with environmental data. •Validations in independent sites and years demonstrate that our tool is operational. Sentinel-2 imagery has revealed a substantial underestimation of burned area (BA) compared with earlier satellite products with coarser spatial resolution. In this context, we investigate the predictability of biases between the reference Sentinel-2 BA product developed for Sub-Saharan Africa (FireCCISFD) in 2019 and commonly used global coarse resolution BA products (MCD64, Fire CCI and C3S), providing tools to refine historical annual BA data before the Sentinel-2 era. To do so, we built a comprehensive dataset of environmental predictors of BA biases, with variables or proxies of (I) the annual BA estimated from the coarse-resolution product, (II) BA sizes, (III) the persistence and strength of BA signals, (IV) the maximum potential BA, and (V) the obstruction of land surface observation from satellites. Full and parsimonious random forest models were performed and validated through out-of-bag (OOB) estimations, and reconstructed BAs were validated with external data over space, and over time. The explained variance in BA biases was ≥78.58% (OOB) for all full and parsimonious models. The reconstructed BA data showed a high correspondence with the reference BA in the validation sites over space (≥91.15% var. explained) and time (≥90.37% var. explained), notably reducing biases of coarse resolution products. As an example of the model applicability, the spatial patterns of Madagascar’s BA were reconstructed for 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020, revealing a burned extent between two and four times higher than previous estimations. The proposed models are operational solutions to obtain regional and global virtually unbiased BA estimates since 2000

Materializing the blue economy: tuna fisheries and the theory of access in the Western Indian Ocean

Many African countries are progressively embracing the blue economy. African islands of the western Indian Ocean, however, have been involved in it for more than twenty years through the exploitation of their 'blue gold': tuna. In this article, we use Ribot and Peluso's (2003) "theory of access" to map the different ways actors access tuna under diverse socio-economic contexts and how power relations are created through different mechanisms of access. We show that rights-based mechanisms such as fishing access agreements are highly questionable for their fairness and sustainability but bring benefits such as funding for fisheries-related infrastructures and projects. We also show that access to the resource is dependent on knowledge held by fishers, on technological advances as well as on diverse labor relations. These mechanisms significantly impact the quantity of fish that can be accessed by artisanal versus industrial market sectors, and generate narratives of unequal access to tuna. Furthermore, we take into consideration the materiality of tuna as a highly mobile resource in a space of fluid boundaries, to show how the fish can be an actant in shaping access but also how fishing practices can produce new materialities. Based on the above evidence, we propose an enhancement of the theory of access to consider the role of materiality of the resources and the sea. We conclude that to ensure that tuna fisheries continue to contribute to the blue economy of African islands, stakeholders need to balance between the diverse benefits produced by the fisheries and the uneven power relations that can arise, and to integrate the impact of a material sea and fish in this reflection