ABSTRACT Balancing agricultural needs with the need to protect biodiverse environments presents a challenge to forestry management. An imbalance in resource production and ecosystem regulation often leads to degradation or deforestation such as when excessive cultivation damages forest biodiversity. Lack of information on geospatial biodiversity may hamper forest ecosystems. In particular, this may be an issue in areas where there is a strong need to reassign land to food production. It is essential to identify and protect those parts of the forest that are key to its preservation. This paper presents a strategy for choosing suitable areas for agricultural management based on a geospatial variation of Shannon's vegetation diversity index (SHDI). This index offers a method for selecting areas with low levels of biodiversity and carbon stock accumulation ability, thereby reducing the negative environmental impact of converting forest land to agricultural use. The natural forest ecosystem of the controversial 1997 Ex-Mega Rice Project (EMRP) in Indonesia is used as an example. Results showed that the geospatial pattern of biodiversity can be accurately derived using kriging analysis and then effectively applied to the delineation of agricultural production areas using an ecological threshold of SHDI. A prediction model that integrates a number of species and families and average annual rainfall was developed by principal component regression (PCR) to obtain a geospatial distribution map of biodiversity. Species richness was found to be an appropriate indicator of SHDI and able to assist in the identification of areas for agricultural use and natural forest management.

In the last few decades, many forests have been cut down to make room for cultivation and to increase food or energy crops production in developing countries. In this study, carbon sequestration and wood production were evaluated on afforested farms by integrating the Gaussian diameter distribution model and exponential diameter-height model derived from sample plots of an afforested hardwood forest in Taiwan. The quantity of sequestrated carbon was determined based on aboveground biomass. Through pilot tests run on an age-volume model, an estimation bias was obtained and used to correct predicted volume estimates for a farm forest over a 20-year period. An estimated carbon sequestration of 11,254 t C was observed for a 189ha-hardwood forest which is equivalent to 41,264 t CO2. If this amount of carbon dioxide were exchanged on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) market, the income earned would be 821 US$ ha- 1. Carbon sequestration from rice (Oryza sativa) or sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) production is discharged as a result of straw decomposition in the soil which also improves soil quality. Sugarcane production does not contribute significantly to carbon sequestration, because almost all the cane fiber is used as fuel for sugar mills. As a result of changing the farming systems to hardwood forest in this study area, carbon sequestration and carbon storage have increased at the rate of 2.98 t C ha- 1 year- 1. Net present value of afforestation for a 20-year period of carbon or wood management is estimated at around US$ 30,000 given an annual base interest rate of 3 %.