Forest certification plays an important role in the global trade of legal, sustainably harvested timber. There is no accurate definition of how international forest certification systems impact international trade from a global perspective. This paper is intended to evaluate the influence of forest certification on international trade, so that it can provide a scientific basis for the improvement of the international forest certification systems and for the development of relevant forestry industries in different countries. First, the influence of forest certification on international trade of forest products is explained in the economic model; hence, four hypotheses are put forward. Second, to test these hypotheses, we verify the panel data of bilateral trade and forest certification of all forest products among 67 economies from 2009 to 2018 by incorporating forest certifications into the gravity model. Finally, tests by country groups and product groups were further analyzed, respectively. The results show that: (1) The extended Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation solves the problem of the heteroscedasticity and zero trade value problems of the gravity model well in the forest industry. (2) Forest certification has an export competitive effect, a trade barrier effect, as well as common language effect. (3) Forest certification has asymmetric trade effects. The export competitive effect of forest certification in developing countries is greater than that in developed countries. Forest certification has become a trade barrier for developing countries, especially in the process of trade with developed countries. The common language effect is higher during the trade between developed and developing countries. The export competitive effect of wood products is higher than that of furniture products. Forest certification has trade barrier effect on wood products in developing countries, while it has trade barrier effect on furniture products in developed countries.

Background: Projections of climate change impacts upon forests are likely inaccurate if based on the premise that only climate controls tree growth. Species interactions control growth, but most research has ignored these effects on how trees respond to climate change. Climate change is inducing natural species selection. However, this selection does not occur at the community level. Species selection starts with competition amongst individual trees. Competition is an individual-to-individual antagonistic interaction that, if severe, can constrain the presence of trees within a particular environment. Thus, climate change impacts individual tree selection within forests. Projecting climate change impacts on forests should account for the effects of climate on tree growth and the effects of competition. The inclusion of competition can increase the predictive power of simulations. Methods: We propose a protocol to systematically map the available literature on climate change impacts on forests and produce a comprehensive list of methods applied to measure competition and model the competition effects on tree growth responses to climate change. This systematic map is not limited to any country or continent or specific tree species or forest type. The scope of the search focuses on time (when the evidence was published), location (geographic location of the evidence) and research design (competition indices and modelling methods). We will evaluate articles at three levels: title, abstract and full text. We will conduct a full-text assessment on all articles that pass a screening at the title and abstract stages. We will report the extracted evidence in a narrative synthesis to summarize the evidence’s trends and report knowledge gaps.

We present results of the paleoparasitological analysis of Cervidae coprolites that were recovered from the archaeological site Furna do Estrago, Pernambuco, Brazil. Trichuris sp. eggs were recovered from the coprolite samples dated 1,040 ± 50 years before present. This is the first record of Trichuris sp. in semiarid Cervidae, unexpectedly recorded in archaeological material.