Deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion in Ghana's forest reserves

Ghana's protected forest reserves have suffered average annual deforestation rates of 0.7%, 0.5%, 0.4%, and 0.6% for the periods 1990–2000, 2000–2005, 2005–2010 and 2010–2015, respectively. The Ashanti region has recorded the second highest deforestation rates. Despite the government's efforts to maintain and protect Ghana's forest reserves, deforestation continues. We observed deforestation patterns in the Ashanti region of Ghana from 1986 to 2015 using Landsat imagery to identify the main causes of deforestation. We obtained and processed two adjacent Landsat images from the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) National Centre for Earth Resources Observation and Science at 30 m spatial resolution for 1986, 2002, and 2015. We then supported the results with findings from 291 farm household surveys in communities fringing the forest reserves. By 2015, dense forest covered 53.3% of the land area of the forest reserves, and the remaining area had been disturbed. Expansion of annual crop farms and tree crops caused 78% of the forest loss within the 29-year period. Afforestation projects are ongoing some of which employ the participation of farmers, yet agricultural expansion exerts more pressure on the remaining dense forest. Agricultural intensification on existing farmlands may reduce farm expansion into the remaining forest areas. Strengthening and enforcing forest protection laws could minimise the extent of agricultural encroachment into forests. Mixed tree-crop systems could reduce the effects of arable farming on deforestation, limit the clearance of trees from farmlands, enhance the provision of ecosystem services, and improve the soil's fertility and moisture content. A forest transition may be underway leading to more trees in agricultural systems and better protection of residual natural forests

System properties determine food security and biodiversity outcomes at landscape scale: a case study from West Flores, Indonesia

The food-biodiversity nexus is a concept that defines and characterizes the complex interactions between agricultural systems and biodiversity conservation. Here we use a social-ecological systems approach that combines fuzzy cognitive mapping and graph theoretic analyses to uncover system properties that determine food security and biodiversity outcomes at a landscape scale. We studied a rice-based agricultural landscape system situated in Mbeliling district of West Flores, Indonesia. A graphical representation of the Mbeliling district food-biodiversity nexus was created by local experts. The representation revealed system properties that help reconcile the trade-offs between food security and biodiversity conservation. The graph represented a diverse set of food security and biodiversity nodes, and showed that there is not a simple dichotomy between 'production and protection'. The analysis captured greater complexity than popular academic concepts such as land sparing-land sharing or sustainable intensification. Three major themes emerged from the graph. We found distinct clusters of factors influencing biodiversity and food security. We named these sources of influence (1) Modernisation and sustainable farming; (2) Knowledge and management; and (3) Governance and processes. Component 2 was the most representative of emergent system properties that contribute positively to managing a sustainable food-biodiversity nexus in the Mbeliling landscape. The key determinants of outcomes were: improving agronomic practices, diversifying production, maintaining forest cover and connectivity, and using knowledge and natural resource management processes to mitigate the main drivers of change. Our approach highlights the complexities in the food-biodiversity nexus, and could have wide application in other locations

A Proposal for Stewardship Support to Private Native Forests in NSW

The Southern Cross Group is proposing a completely new approach to private forest management in NSW based on stewardship support. This means that incentives will be used to encourage landholders to manage their forests in a way that maintains their environmental and other values for the community, without compromising their value as a resource to the farming community. Importantly, the Southern Cross Group system will foster good outcomes through innovation rather than through cumbersome and onerous prescriptions. Private forests in NSW are important as a source of timber as well as for the conservation values they provide to the general community. Landholders should be encouraged to manage them in a way that preserves their productive capacity and their conservation values for the long term. At present, however, neither the current regulatory regime, including the Private Native Forest legislation and proposed code of practice, nor the current market regime encourages sustainable management of the State's private timber resources. The Southern Cross Group has designed an effective and simple way of fostering and rewarding good stewardship of private native forests. Good stewardship may be viewed as a 'duty of care' responsibility that should be enforced by legislation, or as an environmental service that should be recognised and rewarded. The distinction is academic: the reality is that incentives are more effective than punitive regulations. Good environmental outcomes for most forests depend on active management and, especially in the case of private native forests, on incentives for continuing management. The challenge is to devise an equitable scheme that sends the right signals for forest management, is cost-effective to administer, and represents a worthwhile investment in terms of the public good generated. We believe the way forward is with simple, transparent indicators that provide an immediate and ongoing incentive. Under our proposal, landholders will receive an annual cash payment as a reward for progress towards specific outcomes. Rather than complicated targets, we are proposing a simple, two-tiered system that will give enough incentive to landholders to provide the environmental services desired by the community. The first tier rewards and encourages landholders to regenerate more forest, to retain big trees, and to stimulate tree growth on private land. The second tier rewards and encourages stewardship of endangered species and ecological communities. These incentives will be simple to apply and audit, and will encourage landholders to learn about and encourage biodiversity on their land, and to consider it part of their income portfolio. This system will contribute to farmers seeing forests as core business, both as part of their income stream and as part of their environmental stewardship responsibilities. When all farmers view forests in this way, Australia will reap the benefit of forests that are more diverse and productive, and a forest estate that no longer continues to shrink

Quality standards for the management of alcohol-related liver disease: consensus recommendations from the British Association for the Study of the Liver and British Society of Gastroenterology ARLD special interest group

Objective Alcohol-related liver disease (ALD) is the most common cause of liver-related ill health and liver-related deaths in the UK, and deaths from ALD have doubled in the last decade. The management of ALD requires treatment of both liver disease and alcohol use; this necessitates effective and constructive multidisciplinary working. To support this, we have developed quality standard recommendations for the management of ALD, based on evidence and consensus expert opinion, with the aim of improving patient care.Design A multidisciplinary group of experts from the British Association for the Study of the Liver and British Society of Gastroenterology ALD Special Interest Group developed the quality standards, with input from the British Liver Trust and patient representatives.Results The standards cover three broad themes: the recognition and diagnosis of people with ALD in primary care and the liver outpatient clinic; the management of acutely decompensated ALD including acute alcohol-related hepatitis and the posthospital care of people with advanced liver disease due to ALD. Draft quality standards were initially developed by smaller working groups and then an anonymous modified Delphi voting process was conducted by the entire group to assess the level of agreement with each statement. Statements were included when agreement was 85% or greater. Twenty-four quality standards were produced from this process which support best practice. From the final list of statements, a smaller number of auditable key performance indicators were selected to allow services to benchmark their practice and an audit tool provided.Conclusion It is hoped that services will review their practice against these recommendations and key performance indicators and institute service development where needed to improve the care of patients with ALD

Responses of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to long-term inorganic and organic nutrient addition in a lowland tropical forest

Improved understanding of the nutritional ecology of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is important in understanding how tropical forests maintain high productivity on low-fertility soils. Relatively little is known about how AM fungi will respond to changes in nutrient inputs in tropical forests, which hampers our ability to assess how forest productivity will be influenced by anthropogenic change. Here we assessed the influence of long-term inorganic and organic nutrient additions and nutrient depletion on AM fungi, using two adjacent experiments in a lowland tropical forest in Panama. We characterised AM fungal communities in soil and roots using 454-pyrosequencing, and quantified AM fungal abundance using microscopy and a lipid biomarker. Phosphorus and nitrogen addition reduced the abundance of AM fungi to a similar extent, but affected community composition in different ways. Nutrient depletion (removal of leaf litter) had a pronounced effect on AM fungal community composition, affecting nearly as many OTUs as phosphorus addition. The addition of nutrients in organic form (leaf litter) had little effect on any AM fungal parameter. Soil AM fungal communities responded more strongly to changes in nutrient availability than communities in roots. This suggests that the 'dual niches' of AM fungi in soil versus roots are structured to different degrees by abiotic environmental filters, and biotic filters imposed by the plant host. Our findings indicate that AM fungal communities are fine-tuned to nutrient regimes, and support future studies aiming to link AM fungal community dynamics with ecosystem function

Forest governance in a changing world: reconciling local and global values

There has been intense international debate on the governance of forests, in particular tropical forests. This has been driven by contrasting pressures from conservation and human rights groups, respectively calling for global values to prevail so as to protect biodiversity and reduce climate change, or for freedom of choice that empowers local people with the right to manage their own forests. Both sides have condemned irresponsible behaviour by forest officials and political actors, and highlighted the harmful impacts of disregard for the law. However, these normative approaches to forest governance have coincided with a fundamental re-examination of the objectives that societies have for their forest resources. The debate is not only about legality, but also about the legitimacy of forest laws and institutions. This review explores the divergence of views on long-term goals for forests and the implications for their governance. It emphasises that the real challenge is to reconcile the management of forests for values that accrue at different spatial and temporal scales. Forest governance needs to adapt, moving away from a framework based upon the neatly defined boundaries beloved of international organisations and treaties, and submitting to a constant process of adaptation and improvisation at a more local scale. The challenge is to find ways to aggregate such approaches into something that recognisably addresses the global values of forests and forest landscapes. Commonwealth countries have a wide range of forest conditions and are innovating with a range of governance options that provide lessons of potentially wide application

Applying the ITTO-IUCN guidelines for the conservation of biodiversity in tropical production forests

[Extract] ITTO has an important role in negotiating 'normative' guidelines that establish best practice in different domains of forestry. In 1993, a set of Guidelines for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Tropical Production Forests was published. These were informally reviewed by ITTO and its partner the International Union for Conservation of Nature – IUCN – in 2004 and it was decided that although the Guidelines were technically correct they did not address a lot of the policy issues that were fundamental to achieving better conservation outcomes – in addition they were not being widely applied. ITTO and IUCN therefore decided to embark upon a more inclusive process of developing a new set of Guidelines. Workshops were convened with representatives of major international organizations concerned with forest conservation, international conservation ngos, research scientists working on forest biodiversity and forest managers from the private sector