What are the effects of deforestation on the environment?

AbstractAnthropogenic activity drives extensive tropical deforestation, particularly in Southeast Asia where 16% of total forest cover was lost between 2000 and 2020. While land surface changes significantly affect the atmosphere, their net impact on convective clouds is not well‐constrained. Here, we use satellite data to demonstrate long‐term deforestation in Southeast Asia robustly alters cloud properties and provide the first observational evidence that the magnitude of this response depends on the atmospheric environment. Deforestation drives a shift toward more widespread, shallower clouds during the daytime, with amplified effects in dry inland areas compared with moist coastal regions. Aerosols only weakly modulate the cloud fraction response, but offset the cloud top height response to deforestation, suggesting the influence of aerosol indirect effects. We conclude that the local signature of forest loss is not uniform, and regional differences in climatology must be considered when assessing deforestation impacts on clouds and the climate system.

AbstractPolicymakers’ incentives during election campaigns can lead to decisions that significantly affect deforestation. Yet this is rarely studied. For Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a highly biodiverse tropical forest, we link federal‐and‐state as well as municipal elections to annual deforestation between 1991 and 2014. Across 2253 municipalities, those with higher deforestation see a significant rise in deforestation during federal‐and‐state election years. Municipal election years raise deforestation for locations with lower deforestation, whereas all of these increases are accentuated when there is party alignment between different levels of government. This effect of election cycles has fallen over time, to date, yet that cannot be assumed to continue. Our results highlight the need to limit opportunistic behaviors that affect natural resources and the environment with implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and other ecosystem services.

AbstractThrough vegetation‐atmosphere feedbacks, rainfall reductions as a result of Amazon deforestation could reduce the resilience on the remaining forest to perturbations and potentially lead to large‐scale Amazon forest loss. We track observation‐based water fluxes from sources (evapotranspiration) to sinks (rainfall) to assess the effect of deforestation on continental rainfall. By studying 21st century deforestation scenarios, we show that deforestation can reduce dry season rainfall by up to 20% far from the deforested area, namely, over the western Amazon basin and the La Plata basin. As a consequence, forest resilience is systematically eroded in the southwestern region covering a quarter of the current Amazon forest. Our findings suggest that the climatological effects of deforestation can lead to permanent forest loss in this region. We identify hot spot regions where forest loss should be avoided to maintain the ecological integrity of the Amazon forest.

The varied islands of the Pacific provide an ideal natural experiment for studying the factors shaping human impact on the environment. Previous research into pre-European deforestation across the Pacific indicated a major effect of environment but did not account for cultural variation or control for dependencies in the data due to shared cultural ancestry and geographic proximity. The relative importance of environment and culture on Pacific deforestation and forest replacement and the extent to which environmental impact is constrained by cultural ancestry therefore remain unexplored. Here we use comparative phylogenetic methods to model the effect of nine ecological and two cultural variables on pre-European Pacific forest outcomes at 80 locations across 67 islands. We show that some but not all ecological features remain important predictors of forest outcomes after accounting for cultural covariates and non-independence in the data. Controlling for ecology, cultural variation in agricultural intensification predicts deforestation and forest replacement, and there is some evidence that land tenure norms predict forest replacement. These findings indicate that, alongside ecology, cultural factors also predict pre-European Pacific forest outcomes. Although forest outcomes covary with cultural ancestry, this effect disappears after controlling for geographic proximity and ecology. This suggests that forest outcomes were not tightly constrained by colonists’ cultural ancestry, but instead reflect a combination of ecological constraints and the short-term responses of each culture in the face of those constraints.

Riparian deforestation may strongly affect stream functioning, with consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services. These effects can be assessed using bioindicators relating to biotic community structure and ecosystem functioning. We evaluated the effects of riparian deforestation on 1. measures of community structure using aquatic benthic invertebrates, and 2. an aspect of ecosystem functioning, aquatic leaf processing. We selected sites along gradients of riparian land use in four Atlantic rainforest streams and measured physical and chemical properties for their association with riparian deforestation. We sampled benthic invertebrates and calculated metrics of community structure at each site. We measured rates of leaf processing using leaves of a common riparian tree, Guarea guidonia. Riparian deforestation was accompanied by increasing concentration of ammonia, water current and temperature and decreasing nightly oxygen saturation. Invertebrate diversity decreased and community metrics changed with deforestation as expected of negative impacts. Leaf processing decreased with deforestation. Although there were significant differences in physical and chemical measurements among streams, the gradients in community and ecosystem responses were similar, thus suggesting that both types of bioindicators were useful for monitoring changes and relating them to loss of biodiversity and ecosystem function.

Characterizing and managing deforestation are some of the most urgent environmental challenges in the tropics. Forest loss depends on multiple drivers that relate to ecological and socio-economic conditions, and varies significantly in time and space. Understanding the causes and potential consequences of forest loss in a region, requires detailed knowledge of the spatial and temporal behavior of deforestation drivers. This is especially important in Colombia, a country with an immense geographical, ecological and cultural diversity. In this work we use a spatially-explicit modeling platform to identify the influence of multiple deforestation drivers in different biogeographical and planning regions of Colombia. Models were used to produce different deforestation scenarios, resulting in contrasting trends. Results suggest that agricultural activities have a significant role in deforestation in Colombia, although its influence largely varies among regions. Notably, the long-lasting internal conflict in the country, indicated here by a proxy variable, produced contrasting effects on historical deforestation, such that in some areas it acted as an attractor and in some others as a deterrent of deforestation. Our scenarios for the mid-21st century indicate that current trends in deforestation and its drivers (except the internal conflict due to a recent peace agreement) can potentially lead to major ecological impacts, such as fragmentation and loss of connectivity among ecosystems. In the Governance scenario, however, enforcement of conservation in protected areas ensures partial forest conservation, highlighting the key relevance of these areas for biodiversity conservation in the country and for controlling the expansion of deforestation. Given the high spatial and temporal variability of deforestation, and that the same drivers can lead to different responses in different geographic areas, decision-making needs a more efficient approach for designing locally-adapted measurements to face current challenges of conservation and management of forests and their services.

Forests are considered to be the planet's green lungs to regulate the air and protect human health. With trade development, deforestation for agricutlural production will affect the natural environment. However, the effect of trade development and digitalization on individual perceptions of forest roads in agricultural production and nature conservation has yet to be identified. Therefore, this study aims to find how trade development affects nature conservation through the individual perception of forest roads for agriculture. Accordingly, four factors are investigated in these effects (digitalization, deforestation, emissions, and health concerns). The qualitative approach was employed to validate the measurement scale, while the quantitative approach was used to test the proposed hypotheses through a survey of 975 citizens in Vietnam. The results found that trade development indirectly impacts the individual perception of forest road expansion through increased emissions. In contrast, digitalization is found to be an insignificant influence on the individual perspective of road expansion. Moreover, the increase in emissions has the highest impact on individuals’ opposition towards forest roads, followed by deforestation. Trade development helps a transition economy shorten the gap with developed countries by receiving advanced technology from other countries. However, this raises concerns about increasing environmental pollution and increasing emissions. Therefore, transition economies that want to encourage the development of international trade must comply with regulations on nature conservation under the free trade agreements in which they participate.

Forest considered as a lungs of nature, because of its great significance on our ecosystem. But its economic importance it has become as open treasure to human society. And the result is deforestation. In the present age of mechanized civilization in the name of development deforestation has been taking place. Extensive deforestation has caused entropy in ecosystem (like loss of biodiversity, global warming, ozone depletion etc.) and above all on human society. Generally, greater importance is given to the conservation of those forest which covered large areas (reserve forest, national park), but localized forest (less extensive) which has a significant impact on the local climate and human, is the most vulnerable, being neglected by the authorities or people. In this regard this paper highlights spatio-temporal changes of Chaupahari jungle, Birbhum district (West Bengal, India) from 1990-2021 and predicted for the year of 2030 using the current disturbance scenario with help of RS-GIS technique. Over the 31 years periods shows that this deciduous forest primarily being degraded in the form of anthropogenic pressure. Forest are natures precious gift to mankind, which play a vital role to maintain a stable environment. So, deforestation rate in the study area has serious repercussion for natural resources, ecology and socio-economic condition of the locals. To secure future and improvement of this forest adequate attention are required which promote stress free environment.

Deforestation often results in massive carbon emissions and loss of ecosystem services. The objective of this paper is to develop an integrated approach to quantitatively derive changes in forest carbon stock and changes in the economic value of forest carbon due to deforestation. Combining the best available remote sensing and socioeconomic datasets, this approach establishes a comprehensive baseline of deforestation in terms of area, carbon and monetary value change. We applied this end-to-end evaluation method in the Brazilian state of Rondonia to assess the ecological and economic effects of its recent deforestation from 2000 to 2005. Our results suggest that deforestation occurred at an average rate of 2834 km2/yr during the study period, leading to 31 TgC/yr "committed carbon emissions" from deforestation. Coupling with the social cost of carbon at $23/tC and a market discount rate at 7%, this translates to $622 million U.S. dollars/yr loss in the economic value of forest carbon.

Land-use change transforms natural ecosystems, threatening species persistence worldwide. There is increasing evidence that forest loss negatively affects forest-dependent species and matrix quality can favor species maintenance, whereas forest fragmentation has mainly null or positive effects on species. However, the effects of these landscape attributes may depend on the level of regional deforestation. Here, we assess the effects of forest cover, matrix quality, and forest fragmentation (forest patch density) on primate species richness in 92 landscapes in Brazil. We grouped landscapes by their regional deforestation level into low, intermediate, high, and severe deforestation. The effects of landscape attributes varied depending on the level of regional deforestation. Forest loss decreased the proportion of primate species in the four regional deforestation levels, but this association was more important in the low, intermediate and high regional deforestation levels. Matrix quality was positively related to the proportion of primate species in three regional deforestation levels and this association was more important in the high regional deforestation level. Yet, matrix quality decreased the proportion of primate species in the severe regional deforestation level. Forest fragmentation had no clear effects across all deforestation levels. Therefore, different conservation strategies should be prioritized under distinct scenarios. Preventing forest loss is needed in all regions. Increasing matrix quality has positive effects on species richness, especially in highly deforested regions (30–15% remaining forest cover). Finally, as fragmentation had no clear effects on the proportion of primate species, landscape composition should be prioritized in conservation planning over landscape configuration.