Highway construction. Reno, Nevada

The Laboratory for Regional Ecological Activities is an interesting group working out of Stanford that monitors the regional effects of ecological changes.  They can be found on the web here.  To quote their site:

We study how ecosystems and the services they provide to people are changing at regional levels. Our group consists of ecologists, remote sensing specialists, biogeochemists and land-surface modelers, working together scientifically to support conservation, management, and policy development.

There are many links to interesting articles on their site.  One study on selective logging in the Amazon determined that “that nearly one-third of the areas that were logged selectively were completely deforested for grazing and other uses within four years…Sixteen percent of selectively logged forests were cleared within just one year”