Reducing tropical deforestation is an international priority, given its impacts on carbon emissions and biodiversity. We examined whether recent forest transitions—a shift from net deforestation to net reforestation—involved a geographic displacement of forest clearing across countries through trade in agricultural and forest products. In most of the seven developing countries that recently experienced a forest transition, displacement of land use abroad accompanied local reforestation. Additional global land-use change embodied in their net wood trade offset 74% of their total reforested area. Because the reforesting countries continued to export more agricultural goods than they imported, this net displacement offset 22% of their total reforested area when both agriculture and forestry sectors are included. However, this net displacement increased to 52% during the last 5 y. These countries thus have contributed to a net global reforestation and/or decrease in the pressure on forests, but this global environmental benefit has been shrinking during recent years. The net decrease in the pressure on forests does not account for differences in their ecological quality. Assessments of the impacts of international policies aimed at reducing global deforestation should integrate international trade in agricultural and forest commodities.

Landscape attributes influence spatial variations in disease risk or incidence. We present a review of the key findings from eight case studies that we conducted in Europe and West Africa on the impact of land changes on emerging or re-emerging vector-borne diseases and/or zoonoses. The case studies concern West Nile virus transmission in Senegal, tick-borne encephalitis incidence in Latvia, sandfly abundance in the French Pyrenees, Rift Valley Fever in the Ferlo (Senegal), West Nile Fever and the risk of malaria re-emergence in the Camargue, and rodent-borne Puumala hantavirus and Lyme borreliosis in Belgium.

Non-vector-borne zoonoses such as Puumala hantavirus (PUUV) can be transmitted directly, by physical contact between infected and susceptible hosts, or indirectly, with the environment as an intermediate. The objective of this study is to better understand the causal link between environmental features and PUUV prevalence in bank vole population in Belgium, and hence with transmission risk to humans. Our hypothesis was that environmental conditions controlling the direct and indirect transmission paths differ, such that the risk of transmission to humans is not only determined by host abundance. We explored the relationship between, on one hand, environmental variables and, on the other hand, host abundance, PUUV prevalence in the host, and human cases of nephropathia epidemica (NE). Statistical analyses were carried out on 17 field sites situated in Belgian broadleaf forests.

Forest degradation in the tropics is a widespread, yet poorly understood phenomenon. This is particularly true for tropical and subtropical dry forests, where a variety of disturbances, both natural and anthropogenic, affect forest canopies. Addressing forest degradation thus requires a spatially-explicit understanding of the causes of disturbances. Here, we apply an approach for attributing agents of forest disturbance across large areas of tropical dry forests, based on the Landsat image time series. Focusing on the 489,000 km² Argentine Dry Chaco, we derived metrics on the spectral characteristics and shape of disturbance patches. We then used these metrics in a random forests classification framework to estimate the area of logging, fire, partial clearing, riparian changes and drought. Our results highlight that partial clearing was the most widespread type of forest disturbance from 1990–to 2017, extending over 5520 km² (±407 km²), followed by fire (4562 ± 388 km²) and logging (3891 ± 341 km²). Our analyses also reveal marked trends over time, with partial clearing generally becoming more prevalent, whereas fires declined. Comparing the spatial patterns of different disturbance types against accessibility indicators showed that fire and logging prevalence was higher closer to fields, while smallholder homesteads were associated with less burning. Roads were, surprisingly, not associated with clear trends in disturbance prevalence. To our knowledge, this is the first attribution of disturbance agents in tropical dry forests based on satellite-based indicators. While our study reveals remaining uncertainties in this attribution process, our framework has considerable potential for monitoring tropical dry forest disturbances at scale. Tropical dry forests in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia are some of the fastest disappearing ecosystems on the planet, and more robust monitoring of forest degradation in these regions is urgently needed.