Abstract
While forest degradation rates and extent exceed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, less attention is given to the factors controlling its spatial distribution. No quantified correlation exists between changes of forest structure due to anthropogenic disturbances and dynamics of land use and cover change occurring at broader spatial levels. This study examines the influence of multi-scale landscape structure factors (i.e. spatial composition, configuration and dynamic of land use/cover) on primary forest’s aboveground biomass (AGB), spanning from low to highly degraded, in Paragominas municipality (Pará state). We used random forest models to identify the most important landscape predictors of degradation and clustering methods to analyze their distribution and interactions. We found that 58% of the variance of AGB could be explained by metrics reflecting land use practices and agricultural dynamics around primary forest patches and that their spatial patterns were not randomly distributed. Forest degradation is mainly driven by fragmentation effects resulting from old deforestation and colonization events linked with cropland expansion (e.g. soybean and maize) coupled with high accessibility to market. To a lesser extent, degradation is driven by recent and ongoing (1985–2015) deforestation and fragmentation in slash-and-burn agricultural areas, characterized by heterogeneous mosaics of pastures and fallow lands combined with high use of fire. Our findings highlight the potential of landscape-level framework and remotely sensed land cover data for a thorough understanding of the distribution of forest degradation across human-modified landscapes. Addressing these spatial determinants by looking at agricultural dynamics beyond forest cover is necessary to improve forest management which has major implications for biodiversity, carbon and other ecosystem services.
Highlights
Forest degradation provokes a reduction in the capacity of the forest to provide goods and services (Vasquez-Grandón et al 2018)
The only metric calculated at the L1 scale was the overall landscape HET which captures at that scale forest edge effects on aboveground biomass (AGB) values
How do landscape patterns predict forest degradation? Most forest degradation across Paragominas is driven by fragmentation effects resulting from old deforestation and colonization events linked with cropland expansion coupled with high accessibility to market
Summary
Forest degradation provokes a reduction in the capacity of the forest to provide goods and services (Vasquez-Grandón et al 2018). Forest degradation is non-randomly distributed (Matricardi et al 2020) in hotspots (Baccini et al 2017) corresponding to agricultural frontiers with high rates of deforestation, habitat fragmentation and infrastructure development (Tyukavina et al 2016). In this regard, scientific knowledge on the influence of landscape structure (i.e. composition and configuration of land cover/use) on the status of remaining forests remains scattered and incomplete
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