Forest Degradation

Assembled from 46 blocks · 2 evidence · 41 related

1. Story
2. Damage that leaves a forest standing and changes what it is: selective logging that removes the largest trees, understorey fire that kills thin-barked species without producing a visible clearing, edge effects that dry and thin the first few hundred metres inside any boundary, and drought-driven mortality. It is systematically under-counted because the instruments that made deforestation legible were built to detect clear-cutting. A canopy that still closes over a burned understorey looks intact to a sensor calibrated on bare ground. This matters because degradation is not a lesser version of clearance but a different failure mode with its own feedback: a degraded forest transpires less, dries faster, and burns more readily next time, which degrades it further. Published assessments place the degraded area at a scale comparable to or greater than the cleared area, and one influential 2023 synthesis put a large fraction of the remaining forest under some form of degradation. The policy consequence is uncomfortable - a country can drive its deforestation rate down and lose forest function anyway.
3. Knowledge
4. Amazon Basin
5. Amazon Deforestation
6. Forest Degradation
7. Connections
8. Amazon Deforestation
9. Amazon Basin
10. The Southeastern Amazon as a Carbon Source
11. Jaguar (Panthera onca)
12. Indigenous Peoples and Demarcated Territories of the Amazon
13. BR-163 (Cuiaba-Santarem Highway)
14. Moisture Recycling
15. The Amazon Dieback Threshold
16. Forest Degradation
17. The Southeastern Amazon as a Carbon Source
18. Satellite Deforestation Monitoring
19. PPCDAm (Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon)
20. Amazon Soy Moratorium
21. Construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway begins
22. BR-163 opens between Cuiaba and Santarem
23. INPE begins the annual PRODES deforestation series
24. Clearance reaches the highest annual figure in the record
25. The Amazon Soy Moratorium is signed
26. Annual clearance reaches its lowest recorded level
27. Clearance reaches its highest level since the mid-2000s
28. Clearance falls to its lowest level in roughly a decade
29. The UN climate conference convenes at the mouth of the Amazon
30. Amazon River
31. Manaus
32. Moisture Recycling
33. Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO)
34. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
35. Jaguar (Panthera onca)
36. Forest Degradation
37. Arc of Deforestation (Arco do Desmatamento)
38. BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho Highway)
39. The 2005 Amazon Drought
40. A drought in the southwestern basin reverses the carbon sink
41. A second severe drought follows within five years
42. Aircraft profiles show the eastern Amazon emitting more carbon than it absorbs
43. The UN climate conference convenes at the mouth of the Amazon
44. Evidence
45. Supports the synthesis identifying fire, edge effects, selective logging and extreme drought as the principal degradation drivers and estimating that a large fraction of the remaining Amazon forest is subject to at least one of them. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the fraction is deliberately not quoted.
46. Supports the finding that the cumulative area of degraded forest in the Brazilian Amazon over a multi-decade period is comparable to or greater than the cumulative area cleared. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the two areas are deliberately not quoted and the study period is described approximately.