The trees and the bees: using enforcement and income projects to protect forests and rural livelihoods through spatial joint production

Forest managers in developing countries enforce extraction restrictions to limit forest degradation. In response, villagers may displace some of their extraction to other forests, which generates “leakage” of degradation. Managers also implement poverty alleviation projects to compensate for lost resource access or to induce conservation. We develop a model of spatial joint production of bees and fuelwood that is based on forest-compatible projects such as beekeeping in Thailand, Tanzania, and Mexico. We demonstrate that managers can better determine the amount and pattern of degradation by choosing the location of both enforcement and the forest-based activity.

Distributed hoeffding trees for pocket data mining

Collaborative mining of distributed data streams in a mobile computing environment is referred to as Pocket Data Mining PDM. Hoeffding trees techniques have been experimentally and analytically validated for data stream classification. In this paper, we have proposed, developed and evaluated the adoption of distributed Hoeffding trees for classifying streaming data in PDM applications. We have identified a realistic scenario in which different users equipped with smart mobile devices run a local Hoeffding tree classifier on a subset of the attributes. Thus, we have investigated the mining of vertically partitioned datasets with possible overlap of attributes, which is the more likely case. Our experimental results have validated the efficiency of our proposed model achieving promising accuracy for real deployment.

Thorn-dwelling ants provide antiherbivore defence for camelthorn trees, Vachellia erioloba, in Namibia

Ants are widely employed by plants as an antiherbivore defence. A single host plant can associate with multiple, symbiotic ant species, although usually only a single ant species at a time. Different plant-ant species may vary in the degree to which they defend their host plant. In Kenya, ant–acacia interactions are well studied, but less is known about systems elsewhere in Africa. A southern African species, Vachellia erioloba, is occupied by thorn-dwelling ants from three different genera. Unusually, multiple colonies of all these ants simultaneously and stably inhabit trees. We investigated if the ants on V. erioloba (i) deter insect herbivores; (ii) differ in their effectiveness depending on the identity of the herbivore; and (iii) protect the tree against an important herbivore, the larvae of the lepidopteran Gonometa postica. We show that experimental exclusion of ants leads to greater levels of herbivory on trees. The ants inhabiting V. erioloba are an effective deterrent against hemipteran and coleopteran, but not lepidopteran herbivores. Defensive services do not vary among ant species, but only Crematogaster ants exhibit aggression towards G. postica. This highlights the potential of the V. erioloba–ant mutualism for studying ant–plant interactions that involve multiple, simultaneously resident thorn-dwelling ant species.

Soil injections of carbohydrates improve fine root growth of established urban trees

Four established mature tree species (Aesculus hippocastanum L., Betula pendula Roth., Primus avium L. and Quercus rohur L.) commonly planted in UK urban landscapes were subjected to soil injections of the carbohydrate sucrose at 25, 50 and 70g per litre of water. Fine root dry weight was recorded at month 5 following soil injections. Soil injections of sucrose significantly increased fine root dry weight compared to controls, however; growth responses were influenced by species and the concentration of sucrose applied. Results indicate soil injections of sucrose ≥ 50g litre of water may be able to improve root growth of established mature trees. Such a response is desirable as root damage following construction is a frequent problem encountered by established trees growing in UK towns and cities.

Land use intensity and trees on farms in Malawi

Rapidly increasing population densities in Malawi have put a huge strain on the existing agricultural land and the surrounding woodland. Smallholder agriculture is the dominant economic activity of Malawi’s rural population and many farmers have been forced to cultivate marginal lands with less fertile soils, making conditions much more difficult to grow crops. Natural woodland is under increasing pressure from the opening of new lands for cultivation and the increased demand for firewood, timber and other woody resources, with rural households historically obtaining most of their complementary inputs and saleable commodities from nearby areas of forest (Arnold, 1997a). Despite this increasing pressure, woodlands are not being cleared indiscriminately; selected indigenous species are left standing in fields and around households. These are joined by exotic species that are planted and maintained. These trees provide products and services that are vital, yielding food, firewood, building materials and medicine, replenishing soil fertility and protecting against soil erosion. Following a Boserupian approach, this study attempts to establish the reality of a trajectory of enhanced on-farm tree planting and management as population pressure mounts and as part of a more general process of agricultural intensification. The study examines the combination of factors (social, economic, political and environmental) that either stimulate or discourage on-farm tree planting on smallholdings in Malawi, highlighting how woodland resource use changes over a gradient of land use intensity. This study gives a detailed insight into the way that tree planting and management in the smallholder farming system in Malawi works and identifies a trend of increased tree planting/management alongside an increase in agricultural intensification. However, there is no single ‘path’ of intensification; the link between agricultural change and tree planting is complex and there are many trajectories of intensification that a farmer may follow, dependent on his/her social or economic circumstances. The study recommends that agroforestry interventions give rigorous consideration to the needs of the local community, and the suitability of trees to address those needs, before embarking on programmes that advocate tree planting and management as a panacea.

Spatio-temporal variations of ozone and nitrogen dioxide concentrations under urban trees and in a nearby open area

The evergreen Quercus ilex L. is one of the most common trees in Italian urban environments and is considered effective in the uptake of particulate and gaseous atmospheric pollutants. However, the few available estimates on O3 and NO2 removal by urban Q. ilex originate from model-based studies (which indicate NO2/O3 removal capacity of Q. ilex) and not from direct measurements of air pollutant concentrations. Thus, in the urban area of Siena (central Italy) we began long-term monitoring of O3/NO2 concentrations using passive samplers at a distance of 1, 5, 10 m from a busy road, under the canopies of Q. ilex and in a nearby open-field. Measurements performed in the period June 2011-October 2013 showed always a greater decrease of NO2 concentrations under the Q. ilex canopy than in the open-field transect. Conversely, a decrease of average O3 concentrations under the tree canopy was found only in autumn after the typical Mediterranean post-summer rainfalls. Our results indicate that interactions between O3/NO2 concentrations and trees in Mediterranean urban ecosystems are affected by temporal variations in climatic conditions. We argue therefore that the direct measurement of atmospheric pollutant concentrations should be chosen to describe local changes of aerial pollution.

Trees for development? Articulating the ambiguities of power, authority and legitimacy in governing Ghana’s mineral rich forests

The growth of mining activities in Africa in the last decade has coincided with increased attention on the fate of the continent’s forests, specifically in the contexts of livelihoods and climate change. Although mining has serious environmental impacts, scant attention has been paid to the processes which shape decision-making in contexts where minerals and forests overlap. Focussing on the illustrative case of Ghana, this paper articulates the dynamics of power, authority and legitimacy of private companies, traditional authorities and key state institutions in governing mining activities in forests. The analysis highlights how mining companies and donors promote a neoliberal model of resource management which entrenches their ability to benefit from mineral exploitation and marginalises the role of state institutions and traditional authorities in decision-making. This subsequently erodes state authority and legitimacy and compounds the contested nature of traditional authorities’ legitimacy. A more nuanced examination of foundational governance questions concerning the relative role of the state, traditional authorities and private interests is needed.

An assessment of the impact of trees upon archaeology within a relict wetland

An evaluation of a surviving stretch of the Abbot's Way, in the Somerset Levels and Moors, was undertaken to assess the consequences of the previous management regime and inform future management of the site. The scheduled site appeared to have been dewatered and desiccated as a consequence of tree planting and the effects of a deep, adjacent drainage ditch during the previous decade. The evaluation considered the condition of the Neolithic timbers and associated palaeoenvironmental record from three trenches and, where possible, compared the results with those obtained form the 1974 excavation (Girling, 1976). The results of this analysis suggest that the hydrological consequences of tree planting and colonization had a detrimental effect on both the condition of the timbers and insect remains. However, pollen and plant macro-fossils survived well although there was modern contamination. A trench opened outside the scheduled area. where the ground was waterlogged and supported a wet acid grassland flora, revealed similar problems of survival and condition. This almost certainly reflects a period of peat extraction and an associated seasonally fluctuating water table in the 1950s and 1960s; in fact pollen survived better in the scheduled dewatered area. These results are compared with those recovered from the Sweet Track which was evaluated in 1996. Both sites have been subject to recent tree growth but the Sweet Track has been positively managed in terms of hydrology. The most notable difference between the two sites is that insects and wood survived better at the Sweet Track sites than at the Abbot's Way. Insects seem to be a more sensitive indicator of site desiccation than plant remains. It is recommended that any programme of management of wetland for archaeology should avoid deliberate tree planting and natural scrub and woodland generation. It should also take into account past as well as present land use.

Evaluating the annual nature of juvenile rings in Bolivian tropical rainforest trees

Knowledge on juvenile tree growth is crucial to understand how trees reach the canopy in tropical forests. However, long-term data on juvenile tree growth are usually unavailable. Annual tree rings provide growth information for the entire life of trees and their analysis has become more popular in tropical forest regions over the past decades. Nonetheless, tree ring studies mainly deal with adult rings as the annual character of juvenile rings has been questioned. We evaluated whether juvenile tree rings can be used for three Bolivian rainforest species. First, we characterized the rings of juvenile and adult trees anatomically. We then evaluated the annual nature of tree rings by a combination of three indirect methods: evaluation of synchronous growth patterns in the tree- ring series, (14)C bomb peak dating and correlations with rainfall. Our results indicate that rings of juvenile and adult trees are defined by similar ring-boundary elements. We built juvenile tree-ring chronologies and verified the ring age of several samples using (14)C bomb peak dating. We found that ring width was correlated with rainfall in all species, but in different ways. In all, the chronology, rainfall correlations and (14)C dating suggest that rings in our study species are formed annually.

Anthocyanins and tannins in ozone-fumigated guava trees

Psidium guajava ""Paluma"", a tropical tree species, is known to be an efficient ozone indicator in tropical countries. When exposed to ozone, this species displays a characteristic leaf injury identified by inter-veinal red stippling on adaxial leaf surfaces. Following 30 days of three ozone treatments consisting of carbon filtered air (CF - AOT40 = 17 ppb h), ambient non-filtered air (NF - AOT40 = 542 ppb h) and ambient non-filtered air + 40 ppb ozone (NF + O(3) - AOT40 - 7802 ppb h), the amounts of residual anthocyanins and tannins present in 10 P. guajava (""Paluma"") saplings were quantified. Higher amounts of anthocyanins were found in the NF + O(3) treatment (1.6%) when compared to the CF (0.97%) and NF (1.30%) (p < 0.05), and of total tannins in the NF + O(3) treatment (0.16%) compared to the CIF (0.14%). Condensed tannins showed the same tendency as enhanced amounts. Regression analyses using amounts of tannins and anthocyanins, AOT40 and the leaf injury index (LII), showed a correlation between the leaf injury index and quantities of anthocyanins and total tannins. These results are in accordance with the association between the incidence of red-stippled leaves and ozone polluted environments. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fiedler trees for multiscale surface analysis

In this work we introduce a new hierarchical surface decomposition method for multiscale analysis of surface meshes. In contrast to other multiresolution methods, our approach relies on spectral properties of the surface to build a binary hierarchical decomposition. Namely, we utilize the first nontrivial eigenfunction of the Laplace-Beltrami operator to recursively decompose the surface. For this reason we coin our surface decomposition the Fiedler tree. Using the Fiedler tree ensures a number of attractive properties, including: mesh-independent decomposition, well-formed and nearly equi-areal surface patches, and noise robustness. We show how the evenly distributed patches can be exploited for generating multiresolution high quality uniform meshes. Additionally, our decomposition permits a natural means for carrying out wavelet methods, resulting in an intuitive method for producing feature-sensitive meshes at multiple scales. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Evolutionary model trees for handling continuous classes in machine learning

Model trees are a particular case of decision trees employed to solve regression problems. They have the advantage of presenting an interpretable output, helping the end-user to get more confidence in the prediction and providing the basis for the end-user to have new insight about the data, confirming or rejecting hypotheses previously formed. Moreover, model trees present an acceptable level of predictive performance in comparison to most techniques used for solving regression problems. Since generating the optimal model tree is an NP-Complete problem, traditional model tree induction algorithms make use of a greedy top-down divide-and-conquer strategy, which may not converge to the global optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on the use of the evolutionary algorithms paradigm as an alternate heuristic to generate model trees in order to improve the convergence to globally near-optimal solutions. We call our new approach evolutionary model tree induction (E-Motion). We test its predictive performance using public UCI data sets, and we compare the results to traditional greedy regression/model trees induction algorithms, as well as to other evolutionary approaches. Results show that our method presents a good trade-off between predictive performance and model comprehensibility, which may be crucial in many machine learning applications. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Border trees of complex networks

The comprehensive characterization of the structure of complex networks is essential to understand the dynamical processes which guide their evolution. The discovery of the scale-free distribution and the small-world properties of real networks were fundamental to stimulate more realistic models and to understand important dynamical processes related to network growth. However, the properties of the network borders (nodes with degree equal to 1), one of its most fragile parts, remained little investigated and understood. The border nodes may be involved in the evolution of structures such as geographical networks. Here we analyze the border trees of complex networks, which are defined as the subgraphs without cycles connected to the remainder of the network (containing cycles) and terminating into border nodes. In addition to describing an algorithm for identification of such tree subgraphs, we also consider how their topological properties can be quantified in terms of their depth and number of leaves. We investigate the properties of border trees for several theoretical models as well as real-world networks. Among the obtained results, we found that more than half of the nodes of some real-world networks belong to the border trees. A power-law with cut-off was observed for the distribution of the depth and number of leaves of the border trees. An analysis of the local role of the nodes in the border trees was also performed.

Limit theorems for sequences of random trees

We consider a random tree and introduce a metric in the space of trees to define the ""mean tree"" as the tree minimizing the average distance to the random tree. When the resulting metric space is compact we have laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for sequence of independent identically distributed random trees. As application we propose tests to check if two samples of random trees have the same law.

Bootstrap percolation on homogeneous trees has 2 phase transitions

We study the threshold theta bootstrap percolation model on the homogeneous tree with degree b + 1, 2 <= theta <= b, and initial density p. It is known that there exists a nontrivial critical value for p, which we call p(f), such that a) for p > p(f), the final bootstrapped configuration is fully occupied for almost every initial configuration, and b) if p < p(f) , then for almost every initial configuration, the final bootstrapped configuration has density of occupied vertices less than 1. In this paper, we establish the existence of a distinct critical value for p, p(c), such that 0 < p(c) < p(f), with the following properties: 1) if p <= p(c), then for almost every initial configuration there is no infinite cluster of occupied vertices in the final bootstrapped configuration; 2) if p > p(c), then for almost every initial configuration there are infinite clusters of occupied vertices in the final bootstrapped configuration. Moreover, we show that 3) for p < p(c), the distribution of the occupied cluster size in the final bootstrapped configuration has an exponential tail; 4) at p = p(c), the expected occupied cluster size in the final bootstrapped configuration is infinite; 5) the probability of percolation of occupied vertices in the final bootstrapped configuration is continuous on [0, p(f)] and analytic on (p(c), p(f) ), admitting an analytic continuation from the right at p (c) and, only in the case theta = b, also from the left at p(f).