摘要：Ecologists and practitioners have conventionally used forest plots or transects for monitoringchanges in attributes of forest condition over time. However, given the difficulty in collecting such data,conservation practitioners frequently rely on the judgment of foresters and forest users for evaluatingchanges. These methods are rarely compared. We use a dataset of 53 forests in five countries to compareassessments of forest change from forest plots, and forester and user evaluations of changes in forest density.We find that user assessments of changes in tree density are strongly and significantly related to assessmentsof change derived from statistical analyses of randomly distributed forest plots. User assessments of changein density at the shrub/sapling level also relate to assessments derived from statistical evaluations ofvegetation plots, but this relationship is not as strong and only weakly significant. Evaluations of changeby professional foresters are much more difficult to acquire, and less reliable, as foresters are often notfamiliar with changes in specific local areas. Forester evaluations can instead better provide valid single-time comparisons of a forest with other areas in a similar ecological zone. Thus, in forests where localforest users are present, their evaluations can be used to provide reliable assessments of changes in treedensity in the areas they access. However, assessments of spatially heterogeneous patterns of humandisturbance and regeneration at the shrub/sapling level are likely to require supplemental vegetationanalysis
关键词：biodiversity; carbon storage; community forests; forest change; forest monitoring; peopled;forests
