Regional- and district-level drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forestry sector in Russia underwent substantial changes: the state forestry sector was decentralized, the timber industry was privatized, and timber use rights were allocated through short- and long-term leases. To date, there has been no quantitative assessment of the drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia following these changes. In this paper we estimate an econometric model of timber harvesting using remote sensing estimations of forest disturbance from 1990–2000 to 2000–2005 as our dependent variable. We aggregate forest disturbance to administrative districts – equivalent to counties in the United States – and test the impact of several biophysical and economic factors on timber harvesting. Additionally, we examine the impact that regions – equivalent to states in the United States and the main level of decentralized governance in Russia – have on timber harvesting by estimating the influence of regional-level effects on forest disturbance in our econometric model. Russian regions diverged considerably in political and economic conditions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the question is if these variations impacted timber harvesting after controlling for district-level biophysical and economic drivers. We find that the most important drivers of timber harvesting at the district level are road density, the percent of evergreen forest, and the total area of forest. The influence of these variables on timber harvesting changed over time and there was more harvesting closer to urban areas in 2000–2005. Even though district-level variables explain more than 70 percent of the variation in forest disturbance in our econometric model, we find that regional-level effects remain statistically significant. While we cannot identify the exact mechanism through which regional-level effects impact timber harvesting, our results suggest that sub-national differences can have a large and statistically significant impact on land-use outcomes and should be considered in policy design and evaluation.     

Long memory in temperature reconstructions

Ever since H. E. Hurst brought the concept of long memory time series to prominence in his study of river flows the origins of the so-called Hurst phenomena have remained elusive. Two sets of competing models have been proposed. The fractional Gaussian noises and their discrete time counter-part, the fractionally integrated processes, possess genuine long memory in the sense that the present state of a system has a temporal dependence on all past states. The alternative to these genuine long memory models are models which are non-stationary in the mean but for physical reasons are constrained to lie in a bounded range, hence on visual inspection appear to be stationary. In these models the long memory is merely an artifact of the method of analysis. There are now a growing number of millenial scale temperature reconstructions available. In this paper we present a new way of looking at long memory in these reconstructions and proxies, which gives support to them being described by the non-stationary models. The implications for climatic change are that the temperature time series are not mean reverting. There is no evidence to support the idea that the observed rise in global temperatures are a natural fluctuation which will reverse in the near future.     

Geochemistry of lamprophyres from the Western Alps,Italy: implications for the origin of an enriched isotopic component in the Italian mantle

Cenozoic lamprophyres (minettes, spessartites, kersantite) from the Western Alps, northern Italy, represent small volume, mafic melts with high Mg#s and high Ni and Cr contents. All the lamprophyres show light REE enrichment, high incompatible element contents, and Ta, Ti and Nb troughs on chondrite-normalized diagrams. Age-corrected ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr isotopic ratios (assuming t = 30 Ma) are highly variable and range from 0.70590 to 0.71884; ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd ratios range from 0.51203 to 0.51242. Pb isotopic ratios are: ²⁰⁶Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 18.669–18.895, ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 15.605–15.689 and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁴Pb = 38.224–39.134. ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios show a negative correlation with ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd, and a positive correlation with K, Ba, and Rb as well as with Ti, Th, Ta, Nb and Zr abundances. The primitive nature of the lamprophyres, coupled with their enriched incompatible trace element and isotopic signatures, suggest derivation from a metasomatized upper mantle source. Linear arrays in isotope space and elemental data plots suggest mixing between two distinct end-members in the Italian mantle; an enriched end-member that is isotopically similar to pelagic sediments, and a significantly less enriched end-member that approaches Bulk Earth values. New isotopic data indicate that the mantle source(s) of the lamprophyres from the Western Alps contain a very high proportion of the enriched end-member. The geochemical signature of the enriched end-member is attributed to fluids or melts derived from pelagic sediments subducted during the closure of the Tethyan Ocean in the late Cretaceous to early Tertiary.