Tractor-trailer truckslin e up along a red and muddy earthen road. Large vinyl tarpaulins secured by ropes cover the open-topped hoppers of each one. Truck drivers hang out and prepare simple meals using stoves and kitchen utensils contained in a compact box built...

The Brazilian savanna (known as Cerrado) is an upland biome made up of various vegetation types from herbaceous to arboreal. In this paper, MODIS remote sensing vegetation greenness from the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and evapotranspiration (ET) data for the...

Brazil faces an enormous challenge to implement its revised Forest Code. Despite big losses for the environment, the law introduces new mechanisms to facilitate compliance and foster payment for ecosystem services (PES). The most promising of these is a market for...

In evergreen tropical forests, the extent, magnitude, and controls on photosynthetic seasonality are poorly resolved and inadequately represented in Earth system models. Combining camera observations with ecosystem carbon dioxide fluxes at forests across rainfall...

This dissertation proposes and applies three analytical tools and approaches to ex ante assessment of a potential PES project, conducting analyses at regional, project, and individual-level household productive systems levels.

Global changes and associated droughts, heat waves, logging activities, and forest fragmentation may intensify fires in Amazonia by altering forest microclimate and fuel dynamics. To isolate the effects of fuel loads on fire behavior and fire‐induced changes in forest carbon cycling, we manipulated fine fuel loads in a fire experiment located in southeast Amazonia.