Mapping multi-scale impacts of deforestation in the Amazonian rainforest from 1986 to 2010

Abstract

In the Amazonian rainforest, a new and pervasive spatial pattern has been created by road paving and the impacts of road paving usually extend from a small-scale region to an entire social–ecological system, making a multi-scale analysis imperative for thinking through structure, function, and dynamics of deforested landscapes. We propose a moving window approach to describe the deforestation impacts across multiple spatial scales and then illustrate this method with a deforestation example in an Amazon tri-national frontier, which provides an excellent tri-national deforestation and land change comparision for this work. The results indicate that the intensive fragmentation occurs locally, while a large part of the study area is still covered by forest. In addition, a smaller study was undertaken to further assess deforestation impacts, and we found that the cleared areas exhibit strong influences beyond the boundaries of itself. In this research, the landscape-based representation of deforestation dynamics and their impacts on the larger landscape provides important information for forest studies and could be included in future conservation programs.