We recently published a scientific study on Deforestation Frontier Development in the Brazilian Amazon. The study called “Recent transformations of land-use and land-cover dynamics across different deforestation frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon” maps current deforestation frontiers and shows how agricultural development and land-use change coincide with frontier development.
We show that new frontier development is characterized by expanding crop production dynamics and that all frontiers are characterized by improvements in cattle productivity. As for settlements we observe increasing deforestation rates and a persistence of cattle-ranching which requires a larger amount of areas compared to annual or perennial crops. In all frontier types large deforestation events increased again after a steady decrease up to 2012 (see Rosa et al., 2012) which could mean that large landholders are returning to business-as-usual under the current policy regime. The study is published as Open-Access and can be viewed on the Science Direct Homepage here.
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