Abstract
The impact of deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia is a global concern, and land occupation in public lands contributes to increased deforestation rates. Little is known about the spread of deforestation in landholdings in undesignated public lands located on cattle-ranching frontiers. We use a case of Matupi District, a hotspot of deforestation along the Transamazon Highway in the southern portion of Brazil’s state of Amazonas, where spontaneous squatters and land grabbers are the main actors occupying landholdings. We assessed the advance of deforestation and the spatial distribution of landholdings in relation to the main road and to land categories (e.g., protected areas and undesignated public land). Landholdings up to 400 ha were the majority in numbers (52%) and larger landholdings (> 400 ha) were located farther into the forest, contributing to expanding the deforestation frontier. By 2018, 80% of the remaining forest was in larger landholdings (> 400 ha), increasing the susceptibility of this forest to being cleared in the coming years. Thus, greater attention should be given to these larger landholdings to control the spread of deforestation. By analyzing the clearing pattern in the landholdings, deforestation monitoring can focus on specific sizes of landholdings that contribute most to the advance of the deforestation frontier. Brazil’s current trend to facilitating the legalization of illegal claims in undesignated public lands, such as the large and medium landholdings we studied, implies vast areas of future deforestation and should be reversed.
Highlights
Deforestation and forest degradation threaten the remaining Amazonian rainforest
Brazil’s Amazon forest is being cleared and converted to pasture on deforestation frontiers, and this can be expected to increase in response to global demand for commodities, with incorporation of more land into existing deforestation frontiers and the emergence of new frontiers (Beckert et al 2021)
We focus on answering the questions: (i) How do deforestation rate and percentage of remaining forest vary by landholding size? (ii) Has the patch size of the annual clearing in the landholdings changed through the years? (iii) How are the landholdings distributed spatially in relation to the main road and among different land categories?
Summary
Deforestation (i.e., clearcutting of forest cover) and forest degradation (i.e., reduction of services provided by standing forest due impacts such as logging and forest fire) threaten the remaining Amazonian rainforest. The loss of tropical rainforests is one of the world’s great environmental problems because the impacts on forest ecosystem services affect local populations and have global repercussions (Foley et al 2007). 20% of the 4 million km originally forested portion of Brazil’s 5 million km Legal Amazonia region had been cleared by 2021. Annual deforestation rates have been trending upwards since 2012, reaching 13,325 km in 2021, or 2.9 times the 4571 km2 year−1 rate in 2012 (Brazil, INPE 2021). Old frontiers have more deforestation, on new frontiers, deforestation is more rapid because these areas attract new deforestation actors (Schielein and Börner 2018)
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