Introduction to the special issue: Are parks working? Exploring human-environment tradeoffs in protected area conservation.

Protected areas, or parks, remain a major focus for biodiversity conservation globally. The goal of this special issue is to bring together a broad-based set of papers that examine the human dimensions of forest conservation in protected areas across the world. Park landscapes are often characterized by biological and socio-political dilemmas due to conflicts between biodiversity goals and local livelihood strategies. To best inform policy, research should seek to document the livelihoods of people in the landscapes around parks and investigate the impacts that parks and biodiversity outside the parks have on their livelihoods and activities in turn. Given the current debate on the effectiveness of protected area management, there is an urgent need for careful, quantitative evaluations that analyze the impact of exclusionary policies of protected area management on forest cover over time. Each of the four papers in this issue deals with a distinct case study, using different methods and questions. This research illustrates the utility of remote sensing, spatial statistics, fragmentation analyses and modeling for the study of parks, and for evaluation of the potential effectiveness of different management strategies in protected areas. These studies also underline the need for satellite image analysis to be supplemented by detailed field research to provide insights into the social and institutional processes that impact land cover change and forest conservation.