Instant Insights: Sustainable tropical forest management
About this ebook
The first chapter reviews environmental factors determining different types of tropical forest such as temperature, precipitation, sunlight, atmospheric and soil chemistry, as well as mechanical factors.
The second chapter discusses definitions of sustainable forest management (SFM) and reviews how the current scope of SFM can be expanded from individual stands to the scale of forested landscapes.
The third chapter considers the restoration of tropical forests, focusing specifically on forest landscape restoration (FLR). It begins by addressing the importance of implementing forest landscape restoration and provides an overview of different guides and tools for FLR.
The fourth chapter summarises the current state of knowledge on the interactions between forest ecosystems and the climate system and the way in which forests influence the water cycle.
The final chapter provides a detailed overview of recent research undertaken on achieving sustainable management of tropical forests. It discusses the importance of tropical forest ecology, as well as the role of SFM in contributing to achieving several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
About the author
Patrick Hardcastle is a Forestry Development Specialist who has worked in over 40 countries in the last 55 years. He started his career with 12 years in the Malawi Forestry Department, the last eight heading the Forestry Research Institute while specialising in silviculture and site classification. He followed this with 10 years of mainly post-graduate teaching at the Universities of Oxford and Aberdeen. Thereafter, he has been a consultant working with major bilateral and multilateral donors with a focus on forestry but increasingly also engaged with biodiversity conservation, climate change, economic and social equity within the broad framework of sustainable forest management.
Alice Muchugi has over 20 years of experience in research on sustainable utilisation and conservation of tropical tree genetic resources. Since 2014, she is the Manager of Genetic Resource Unit at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi where she coordinates the activities of the ICRAF seedbank in Nairobi and regional field genebanks to ensure that superior tree germplasm is available for ICRAF collaborative projects and other interested users. Formerly, Alice was a senior lecturer at the Kenyatta University where in addition to teaching Genetics, she mentored and supervised several graduate students. She has a PhD in Population Genetics from Kenyatta University, Kenya. She has published over 90 publications.
Dr Jürgen Blaser is Professor of International Forestry and Climate Change at Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland. Professor Blaser is a former Chair of the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and former Senior Forestry Advisor at the World Bank.
