Analysis of possible REDD program interventions in a large-scale Amazon landscape indicates that even modest flows of forest carbon funding can provide substantial cobenefits for aquatic ecosystems, but that the functional integrity of the landscape’s myriad small watersheds would be best protected under a more even spatial distribution of forests. Because of its focus on an ecosystem service with global benefits, REDD could access a large pool of global stakeholders willing to pay to maintain carbon in forests, thereby providing a potential cascade of ecosystem services to local stakeholders who would otherwise be unable to afford them.

Understory fire modeling is a key tool to investigate the cornerstone concept of landscape ecology, i.e. how ecological processes relate to landscape structure and dynamics. Within this context, we developed FISC—a model that simulates fire ignition and spread and...