Consequently, these data are extremely useful to alert authorities about the occurrence of large-scale deforestation events, but do not capture small-scale deforestation.
Results suggest that centralized policy efforts introduced starting in the mid-2000s inhibited medium- and large-scale deforestation, but had heterogeneous effects on small-scale deforestation.
That is based on a guesstimate of the drop in output that might result from even a small deforestation-related decline in precipitation.
Four categories of historical land-use were identified: old and dominant pasture cover on small properties, recent deforestation and dominance of secondary growth, old extensive pastures and large forest remnants and, recent deforestation, pasture and large forest remnants.
Results in large-scale catchments, suggest similar effects to those in small-scale catchments, with deforestation resulting in an increase in streamflow (Costa et al. [2003]; Siriwardena et al. [2006]).
"Even a small-scale rate of deforestation will have a large impact over time," says study co-author Pontus Olofsson of Boston University.
Access facilitated colonization and subsequent deforestation by small-scale migrant farmers pursuing agriculture and cattle ranching [168] [174], with an additional role played by indigenous peoples' farming of commercial crops [174].
On a per-unit-area basis, the net fluxes within mature forests are expected to be much smaller than these from deforestation, degradation, and regrowth processes, but such small changes in mature forests may nevertheless scale to large values when integrating over bigger regions.
The results confirmed the expected generally small level of net deforestation for Gabon.
Specifically, maximizing the size of forest patches caused deforestation of small forest patches, resulting in a large, complex-shaped, dispersed forest; minimizing forest patch shapes resulted in the dissection of large, complex-shaped forests into smaller, simpler-shaped fragments; and land development based on past trends resulted in the aggregation of urbanized land-use in gentler terrains.
