Rethinking forest monitoring for more meaningful global forest landscape change assessments.

Forest ecosystems play an indispensable role in addressing various pressing sustainability and social-ecological challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem services deterioration, hence the monitoring of the world's forests is crucial. As part of the global forest assessment workflow, a forest is generally classified and mapped based on land use and/or using a tree canopy cover threshold. In this paper, we examine the limitations of this approach and argue that the use of a land use-based forest definition and tree canopy cover thresholds can overlook forest degradation and enhancement, disguise the actual status of forest landscapes, and misinform management planning. These limitations can delay the development and implementation of forest restoration and conservation measures. To help overcome these issues, we propose some enhancements to the global forest assessment workflow, including the sharing of spatial data and inclusion of tree canopy cover estimates in assessment reports. Such enhancements are needed to achieve more meaningful forest monitoring and reporting in the context of global environmental initiatives, such as those related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, forest restoration, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem services monitoring.

The impact of swidden decline on livelihoods and ecosystem services in Southeast Asia: A review of the evidence from 1990 to 2015.

Global economic change and policy interventions are driving transitions from long-fallow swidden (LFS) systems to alternative land uses in Southeast Asia's uplands. This study presents a systematic review of how these transitions impact upon livelihoods and ecosystem services in the region. Over 17 000 studies published between 1950 and 2015 were narrowed, based on relevance and quality, to 93 studies for further analysis. Our analysis of land-use transitions from swidden to intensified cropping systems showed several outcomes: more households had increased overall income, but these benefits came at significant cost such as reductions of customary practice, socio-economic wellbeing, livelihood options, and staple yields. Examining the effects of transitions on soil properties revealed negative impacts on soil organic carbon, cation-exchange capacity, and aboveground carbon. Taken together, the proximate and underlying drivers of the transitions from LFS to alternative land uses, especially intensified perennial and annual cash cropping, led to significant declines in pre-existing livelihood security and the ecosystem services supporting this security. Our results suggest that policies imposing land-use transitions on upland farmers so as to improve livelihoods and environments have been misguided; in the context of varied land uses, swidden agriculture can support livelihoods and ecosystem services that will help buffer the impacts of climate change in Southeast Asia.