Poor households in Cameroon rely on trees and tree-based products like the bark of Prunus africana (Hook.f.) Kalman (Rosaceae) (henceforth called Prunus) that are harvested from the wild. Due to unsustainable bark harvesting practices, the European Union, which is Cameroon's main market for Prunus bark, banned its importation. To reduce pressure on existing natural stock, research and development organizations introduced innovations to encourage farmers to plant Prunus trees. The research reported in this article analyses farmer characteristics which influence their Prunus planting behaviour, and examines their main problems. Results from interviewing 154 farmers who have been trained on tree domestication techniques suggest that male farmers and those who bought their land have planted Prunus in their farms. We conclude that Prunus information and planting campaigns can be effective if they are accompanied with policies which influence better prices, supply of seeds and seedlings, and address land tenure issues.

The purpose of this study was to assess the evolution of private forest districts during the last decade and to explore the main challenges such entities are facing, based on the existing statistics and a nationwide survey of private forest district managers. In 2011, the 132 authorized private forest districts had under administration 1.529 million ha of non-state forests (23 percent of the total forest area of Romania), whilst in 2010 the harvested volume exceeded 5.89 million m³ and the cumulated annual turnover of the private forest districts was 107 million Euro. The managers of private forest districts face various challenges in their relationship with owners and state authorities. The significant structural transformation of the forestry sector had an important impact on the evolution of private forest districts and considering that more than 1 million ha of non-state forests are still administrated by the state, the number of private forest districts and their role in the Romanian forestry sector could increase significantly in the future.

This is a review of forestry related multi-angular remote sensing which is a recent technology making use of optical remote sensing datasets collected from differing viewing-angles during a short period of time. A particular advantage of these datasets lies in their capability to capture structural information. Since forests can be considered to be one of the most complex natural surfaces of the Earth in terms of horizontal and vertical structure, multi-angular remote sensing is a promising tool which can be used to enhance existing remote-sensing applications in order to extract forest information products.

The general concept of multi-angular remote sensing and its relation to radiative transfer models is briefly presented. In the main section the paper gives an overview of multi-angular remote sensing applications in forestry by highlighting relevant publications of the latest years focusing on parameters such as LAI, canopy clumping, biomass, plant-chemical attributes, forest types and species (classification).

The role of democracy on deforestation has been analysed previously but the results have been contradictory. In this study, FAO statistics on forest area change in countries of the world from 2000 to 2010 were compared with three independent democracy indices. Democratic less-developed countries caused 55%–74% of the net global forest area decrease and non-democratic less-developed countries caused 66%–67% of the net forest increase. When the relative forest area change weighted with forest area in the country was plotted against the level of democracy in 121–131 less-developed countries the slopes of fitted linear regressions were statistically significant for all three democracy indices, linking positive forest area change and non-democracy. The potential mechanisms causing these trends are unclear but nevertheless the vigorous promotion of democratic methods by donors in high-income countries should be questioned.

This paper describes the use of beetles (forest insects) as an income source in the Southwest region of Cameroon and the contribution of this activity to rural livelihood improvement. Data was obtained through interviews conducted in 96 households in 6 villages. We found that the beetle trade provides complementary household income to forest dependent populations who rely on agriculture, hunting and gathering for their livelihoods. Income obtained from insect trade supports basic household needs and facilitates the acquisition of some farming inputs, but the sector remains informal. Considering the socioeconomic importance of this sector, insect trade should be formalized in order to manage the resource sustainably, increase benefits from their exploitation and concomitantly foster their impact on poverty alleviation and communitybased conservation of the relic forest patches in the region.

This paper proposes an analytical framework for forest law compliance to advance scholarly investigations of an important and growing problem. An inductive approach is taken to integrate the existing research on compliance in forestry with multiple theoretical models of rule compliance. Specific compliance models are drawn from economic, socio-institutional and psychological perspectives on compliance behaviour. The proposed framework highlights the individual as a decision-maker that is influenced by multiple motivations, which are in turn affected by external context specific variables. In general, the motivations that are proposed to influence the compliance decision include: instrumental benefits and costs, social and personal norms, and legitimacy. The degree to which each of these is incorporated in the decisionmaking process depends upon the social, political and economic variables that characterize the external environment. The analytical framework lays the groundwork for a structured research agenda on compliance in the forest sector.

Prescribed burning in forestry is a valuable land management tool that has been extensively used in Australia, Eurasia, and North America. Nevertheless, fire is inherently dangerous and may impose risk upon humans, properties, and other natural resources. With the case of southern United States, the objective of this study is to assess the trend of administrative law reforms for forestry prescribed burning within the theoretical framework of management-based regulation. A key finding is that existing regulations focus on the production and management process of prescribed burning to identify and reduce risk. They demand moderate resource commitments, and many are related to the planning stage of a burn rather than the implementation stage. These results will assist the public in comprehending the rationale and trend of administrative law reforms for prescribed burning. Countries facing similar challenges in achieving a sustainable growth of forest resources can also learn from these legal reform experiences for forestry prescribed burning in the United States.

Some of the long-term consequences of China's collective forests tenure reform were projected with the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM). The reform had a positive effect on the wood supply and demand balance. By 2020 the reform led to a 14 to 36 percent decrease of China's imports of industrial roundwood. Concurrently, the rest of the world produced less, but several other countries especially in Europe, imported more. Despite the positive short-term effect of the reform on supply, China's industrial roundwood deficit was still increasing, but at a slower rate, after the reform was complete, due to the high demand induced by China's fast growing economy. Furthermore, while the tenure reform on collective forests mitigated China's timber shortage, it also decreased China's forest stock, with adverse effects for biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Nevertheless, globally, this negative effect was compensated by a more than equal increase of forest stock in the rest of the world.

Using the Market Analysis and Development approach to generate the results presented in this paper, it was found that rural communities prefer certain NWFP for increasing their incomes in central Africa. Four enterprise development factors including market/economic, social, environmental and technological considerations were useful criteria for the NWFP selection process. 14 local non-governmental organisations were trained on enterprise development modules that further trained 233 groups with a total membership of 3515 people in 87 villages. Significant variation was observed between countries in terms of total membership and the number of women engaged per group. It was suggested that the promotion of NWFPs through small-scale enterprise development could form an important entry point for poverty alleviation and food security in Central African villages.

China is one of the poorest countries with respect to per capita water resources, and water resources have become an increasingly more important factor restricting the development of China. Virtual water theory provides new ideas and new ways to improve water use efficiency, and to ease water shortages. This paper estimated the virtual water contents of two forests types using the water consumption of forest transpiration with representative species, and thus calculated the virtual water content of primary woody products by using the production tree method, then analyzed the virtual water trade of primary woody products in China. The results show that woody products are water-intensive products, and woody products trade is associated with a huge amount of virtual water trade. The virtual water trade of China's primary woody products belongs to the net imports, but its structure need further be optimized.