Papers by Matthew G Hethcoat
University of Sheffield, Nov 1, 2019
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Remote Sensing, 2022
Tropical forests play a key role in the global carbon and hydrological cycles, maintaining biolog... more Tropical forests play a key role in the global carbon and hydrological cycles, maintaining biological diversity, slowing climate change, and supporting the global economy and local livelihoods. Yet, rapidly growing populations are driving continued degradation of tropical forests to supply wood products. The United Nations (UN) has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme to mitigate climate impacts and biodiversity losses through improved forest management. Consistent and reliable systems are still needed to monitor tropical forests at large scales, however, degradation has largely been left out of most REDD+ reporting given the lack of effective monitoring and countries mainly focus on deforestation. Recent advances in combining optical data and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data have shown promise for improved ability to monitor forest losses, but it remains unclear if similar improvements could be made in detecting and mapping...
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Selective logging is the primary driver of forest degradation in the tropics and reduces the capa... more Selective logging is the primary driver of forest degradation in the tropics and reduces the capacity of forests to harbour biodiversity, maintain key ecosystem processes, sequester carbon, and support human livelihoods. While the preceding decade has seen a tremendous improvement in the ability to monitor forest disturbances from space, advances in forest monitoring have almost universally relied on optical satellite data from the Landsat program, whose effectiveness is limited in tropical regions with frequent cloud cover. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data can penetrate clouds and have been utilized in forest mapping applications since the early 1990s, but no study has exclusively used SAR data to map tropical selective logging. A detailed selective logging dataset from three lowland tropical forest regions in the Brazilian Amazon was used to assess the effectiveness of SAR data from Sentinel-1, RADARSAT-2 and PALSAR-2 for monitoring tropical selective logging. We built Random F...
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Ecological Applications, 2020
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Ecology and Evolution, 2020
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Oecologia, 2019
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Remote Sensing of Environment, 2019
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Biological Conservation, 2018
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Environmental Research Letters, 2020
Tropical forests harbour the highest biodiversity on the planet and are essential to human liveli... more Tropical forests harbour the highest biodiversity on the planet and are essential to human livelihoods and the global economy. However, continued loss and degradation of forested landscapes, coupled with a rapidly rising global population is placing incredible pressure on forests globally. The United Nations has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) programme in response to the challenges facing tropical forests and in recognition of the role they can play in climate mitigation. REDD+ requires consistent and reliable monitoring of forests, however, national-level methodologies for measuring degradation are often bespoke and, because of an inability to track degradation effectively, the majority of countries combine reporting for deforestation and forest degradation into a single value. Here, we extend a recent analysis that enabled the detection of selective logging at the scale of a logging concession to a regional-scale estimation of se...
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Remote Sensing of Environment
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Biological Conservation, 2018
Selective logging for timber production affects vast areas across the tropics, yet we lack detail... more Selective logging for timber production affects vast areas across the tropics, yet we lack detailed understanding of the impacts of logging intensity on biodiversity. These impacts can be studied at two levels: the impacts of logging intensity on overall diversity and community composition; and how logging intensity affects individual species' abundance-logging yield relationships. The latter underpins whether land-sharing logging (i.e. low intensity throughout) or land-sparing logging (i.e. high intensity with retention of some primary forest) is the optimal strategy. We examine both levels to determine the impacts of local-scale logging intensity on butterflies in Rondônia, Brazil, the global epicenter of butterfly alpha-diversity. Overall butterfly abundance was highest at intermediate logging intensity, whereas species richness increased after logging but was not affected by logging intensity, and that species composition increasingly changed from the primary community composition at higher logging intensities. Using individual species' abundance-yield curves, we then simulated species responses to a suite of logging strategies, ranging from total sharing to total sparing. Logging simulations predicted that more butterfly species would benefit from low-intensity land-sharing logging, having higher abundances than under land-sharing scenarios. However, some butterfly clades benefited disproportionally from the retention of primary forest within land-sparing logging concessions. Butterflies overall may benefit from intermediate logging strategies that promote a combination of low and high intensity logged areas, with some protected primary forest.
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1.Demographic consequences of human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) have been widely d... more 1.Demographic consequences of human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) have been widely documented for many populations. The mechanisms underlying such patterns, however, are rarely investigated and yet are critical to understand for effective conservation and management.
2.We investigated the mechanisms underlying reduced avian nest survival with intensification of natural gas development, an increasing source of HIREC globally. We tested the hypothesis that energy development increased the local activity of important nest predator species thereby elevating nest predation rates. During 2011–2012, we surveyed predators and monitored 668 nests of Brewer's sparrows Spizella breweri, sagebrush sparrows Artemisiospiza nevadensis and sage thrashers Oreoscoptes montanus breeding at twelve sites spanning a gradient of habitat loss from energy development in western Wyoming, USA.
3.Nine species, representing four mammalian and three avian families, were video-recorded depredating eggs and nestlings. Important nest predator species differed across songbird species, despite similar nesting habitats. Approximately 75% of depredation events were by rodents.
4.Consistent with our predictions, detections of most rodent nest predators increased with surrounding habitat loss due to natural gas development, which was associated with increased probability of nest predation for our three focal bird species.
5.An altered nest predator assemblage was therefore at least partly responsible for elevated avian nest predation risk in areas with more surrounding energy development.
6.Synthesis and applications. We demonstrate one mechanism, i.e. the local augmentation of predators, by which human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) can influence the demography of local populations. Given the accelerating trajectory of global energy demands, an important next step will be to understand why the activity and/or abundance of rodent predators increased with surrounding habitat loss from energy development activities.
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Open-File Report, 2014
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Open-File Report, 2014
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Thesis by Matthew G Hethcoat
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Papers by Matthew G Hethcoat
2.We investigated the mechanisms underlying reduced avian nest survival with intensification of natural gas development, an increasing source of HIREC globally. We tested the hypothesis that energy development increased the local activity of important nest predator species thereby elevating nest predation rates. During 2011–2012, we surveyed predators and monitored 668 nests of Brewer's sparrows Spizella breweri, sagebrush sparrows Artemisiospiza nevadensis and sage thrashers Oreoscoptes montanus breeding at twelve sites spanning a gradient of habitat loss from energy development in western Wyoming, USA.
3.Nine species, representing four mammalian and three avian families, were video-recorded depredating eggs and nestlings. Important nest predator species differed across songbird species, despite similar nesting habitats. Approximately 75% of depredation events were by rodents.
4.Consistent with our predictions, detections of most rodent nest predators increased with surrounding habitat loss due to natural gas development, which was associated with increased probability of nest predation for our three focal bird species.
5.An altered nest predator assemblage was therefore at least partly responsible for elevated avian nest predation risk in areas with more surrounding energy development.
6.Synthesis and applications. We demonstrate one mechanism, i.e. the local augmentation of predators, by which human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) can influence the demography of local populations. Given the accelerating trajectory of global energy demands, an important next step will be to understand why the activity and/or abundance of rodent predators increased with surrounding habitat loss from energy development activities.
Thesis by Matthew G Hethcoat
2.We investigated the mechanisms underlying reduced avian nest survival with intensification of natural gas development, an increasing source of HIREC globally. We tested the hypothesis that energy development increased the local activity of important nest predator species thereby elevating nest predation rates. During 2011–2012, we surveyed predators and monitored 668 nests of Brewer's sparrows Spizella breweri, sagebrush sparrows Artemisiospiza nevadensis and sage thrashers Oreoscoptes montanus breeding at twelve sites spanning a gradient of habitat loss from energy development in western Wyoming, USA.
3.Nine species, representing four mammalian and three avian families, were video-recorded depredating eggs and nestlings. Important nest predator species differed across songbird species, despite similar nesting habitats. Approximately 75% of depredation events were by rodents.
4.Consistent with our predictions, detections of most rodent nest predators increased with surrounding habitat loss due to natural gas development, which was associated with increased probability of nest predation for our three focal bird species.
5.An altered nest predator assemblage was therefore at least partly responsible for elevated avian nest predation risk in areas with more surrounding energy development.
6.Synthesis and applications. We demonstrate one mechanism, i.e. the local augmentation of predators, by which human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) can influence the demography of local populations. Given the accelerating trajectory of global energy demands, an important next step will be to understand why the activity and/or abundance of rodent predators increased with surrounding habitat loss from energy development activities.