East Asia and Pacific

background

This 139-page report outlines the state of the Spanish colonial Forestry Bureau at time of arrival of US forces in the Philippines (~1900), and reforms instituted by Captain Ahern. He describes the timber business in the Philippines including the state of the forested lands, species exploited, and volumes exported. At that time, 160 species of native trees were exported, but the Forestry Bureau knew of 665 native tree species. Ahern suggests trying to find a use for them to make timber extraction more profitable. Samples of 100 species were sent to the US for exhibition.

• This study provides a detailed description of Philippine dipterocarp forests, including details on climatic conditions and composition in the first pages. Page 430 has a table of natural stand regeneration studies of a range of plots (natural and cut over), listing seedling numbers and size class distribution of 5 species in “virgin Negros rainforest” (Table 3); 7-10 species of Bataan are listed on p. 433-437 (Table V-VII), 6 species in Laguna are listed on p. 438-441 (Table VIII-IX), and multiple species of Mt Maquiling are listed on p. 444-450 (Table X-XII).
• Succession pathways on cleared land are described starting on p. 451.

background

This chapter reviews the meaning and implementation of landscape scale restoration in the Asia-Pacific region.  The authors define landscape as a spatial mosaic with differing land use patterns across a gradient, usually involving natural and human-intervened areas which changes through time.