Forest degradation — access roads, selective logging, fires, natural disturbances — is having a far greater impact on reducing carbon storage in the southern Brazilian Amazon than deforestation, according to a new study that has produced some of the most precise findings of changes in carbon stocks in a critically important region of the tropics. In real terms, forest degradation reduced carbon storage in the study area five times more than deforestation, a finding not currently reflected in Brazil’s carbon emissions accounting. “When countries report their forest and carbon changes, they mostly rely on deforestation because it’s much easier to see and quantify,” Ovidiu Csillik, lead author who is formerly of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, told Mongabay. “But we’ve found that forest degradation is actually more important in terms of carbon loss.” Analyzing and comparing data from 2016 and 2018 in Brazil’s so-called Arc of Deforestation and covering 48,280 hectares (119,300 acres), a team of international experts divided the region into 99 transects. They used repeated flyovers of airborne lidar, a remote laser sensor technology that registers objects in three dimensions and obtains detailed data, to produce two vast data sets, according to the study published in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal, PNAS. Tropical forests are subject to a range of disturbance types or degradation from small-scale mortality from natural processes affecting one or a few trees. This includes fire, flooding, landslides, selective logging or weather-related tree toppling. Image courtesy of K.C.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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