The greatest deforestation is occurring in the tropics, where a wide variety of forests exists.
He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continue to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
"I think the Gran Chaco results are quite surprising — there's much greater deforestation than we expected," Dr. Mulligan said.
Our results show that changes in the last decade have been subtle, but that certified farms differ from surrounding areas for the greater deforestation control and habitat availability for both land cover types, and for the greater connectivity for P. maximus.
In a tiger reserve in central India, we find that the densely populated villages located outside the park boundary are better connected to regional markets by road networks, and are associated with greater deforestation rates and more forest fragmentation compared to the more isolated villages in the park interior.
We hypothesised that leakage would result in greater deforestation rates in reserve buffer zones than in the broader reserve landscapes, but such a pattern was observed in only five African sites, suggesting that leakage does not often occur on the edge of established reserves.
Greater deforestation in West Africa relative to Central Africa [24], [25] provides a comparative framework for assessing the evolutionary implications of changes to the rainforest-savanna gradient for species that inhabit both regions.
To confirm that regional differences in rainforest-ecotone morphological divergence were due to greater deforestation in West Africa, and not to a persistent historical pattern, we collected morphological data from historical specimens of A. virens deposited at the Natural History Museum at Tring, United Kingdom (Table S3, details in Text S1).
Accuracy was least where forest regeneration predominated (80%), and greatest where deforestation predominated (90%).
The opposite trend was observed between the 1980s and 2000s; forest regeneration was greater than deforestation at the landscapes with 10%and50%0% of forest cover and, as a consequence, forest cover increased.
