Although most of the areas cleared for crops and grazing represent permanent and continuing deforestation, deforestation can be transient.
Due to deforestation, forested permanent sample plots might become deforested over time and thus sampling intensity might become too low to provide forest change estimates with a desired reliability.
But it is difficult to unpick how much of that fall is due to increased government enforcement - meaning deforestation is under permanent control - or fluctuations in beef and soy prices, or the rising value of Brazil's currency or increases in the productivity of cleared land.
Aguiar et al. [14] built spatial regression models to assess the determining factors of deforestation, pasture, temporary and permanent agriculture in Amazon.
A more sustainable scenario for the region requires a major reduction of deforestation activities, implementing the "permanent preservation area" policy along riversides, and controlling land-use transitions at balanced levels.
SPR offers the possibility to increase sampling intensity in areas with high degradation intensities or to establish new plots in areas where permanent plots are lost due to deforestation.
Roads are permanent scars on the landscape and facilitate deforestation and forest fragmentation due to increased accessibility and land valorization, which control land-use and land-cover dynamics.
Forest are thus in peril where there are more roads, and long-term conservation strategies should consider ways to mitigate roads as permanent landscape features and drivers facilitators of deforestation and forest fragmentation.
For scenarios with no treatment bias applied, simulated deforestation and degradation occurred on permanent plots with the same frequency at which it occurred elsewhere, leading to a representative sample.
