The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil inherited, in its National Forest Program, a formidable proposal to increase the area designated to national forests (Flonas) in the Amazon from eight to 50 million hectares by the year 2010. This objective is an ambitious and worthy conservation goal, and one that appears to be holding approval, give or take a few million hectares, within the new government. Attached to this plan, however, is a lingering desire to allow private timber harvesting on Flonas through a system of forest concessions.
Quantitative reconstruction of vegetation cover from modern pollen rain in the Cerrado biome of Brazil
Fossil pollen assemblages are an important tool to reconstruct vegetation variability at centennial and millennial-scales. However, in the Cerrado biome of Brazil, the influence of the local vegetation, the heterogeneity of the landscape and the accuracy of pollen...