The remote-sensing of forest cover from satellites has greatly increased the accuracy with which we can determine the conversion of tropical forests into other land uses. Despite these advances, we have a very poor understanding of the consequences of these changes in land-cover for tropicalforest biodiversity. This information is essential for the development of effective conservation strategies. We aim to help resolve this lack of information by developing and implementing robust field studies that quantify the biodiversity value of the anthropogenichabitats that are currently replacing primary forest.

Forest management and agricultural programs have expanded rapidly across the tropics in recent decades. We aim to develop and implement robust and long-term assessments of current practices, thereby assisting decision-makers to understand how to effectively mitigate the environmental impacts of economic forestry and agricultural development.

Beyond physical deforestation, forests are increasingly threatened by more cryptic threats such as selective logging, understorey fires and over-hunting that are less easy or impossible to detect from above the forest canopy. We aim to quantify the impact of these more cryptic forms of forest disturbance by studying their extent and effect across variety of forest types and regions.

We believe that these aims will be most effectively met through improving levels of international collaboration in the conservation science community, and by strengthening the capacity of the next generation of scientists in developing tropical countries.

The aim of this site is to provide a readily accessible resource-base for conservation scientists, planners and landscape managers. We are very interested in hearing from people and research groups wishing tocollaborate and host their work and projects on this site.