Found: The tipping point in deforestation

UC professor Tomasz Stepinski’s land-use map shows changing landscapes in North and South America. White indicates little or no change. Darker shades indicate the highest rate of change in each category. Forest loss was the most noticeable category in Central and South America. Graphic/Tomasz Stepinski/UC

Article Highlights

University of Cincinnati geography researchers have identified a tipping point for deforestation that leads to rapid forest loss.
Geography professor Tomasz Stepinski used high-resolution satellite images from the European Space Agency to study landscapes in 9-kilometer-wide blocks across every inch of the planet between 1992 and 2015. He found that deforestation occurs comparatively slowly in these blocks until about half of the forest is gone. Then the remaining forest disappears very quickly.
Nature abhors mixed landscapes, at least on a scale of 81 square kilometers. The study showed that mixed landscapes (like agriculture and forest) are comparatively few and, more surprisingly, do not stay mixed for long. These mixed blocks tend to become homogeneous over time, regardless of the landscape type.
Deforestation was the most pronounced example of human-caused landscape change, researchers found
“Planet Earth wants to be homogeneous. The land wants to be the same in all these patches. And when they start to change, they don’t stop until they convert everything into another homogeneous block,” he said.
The forest is more vulnerable to change when there has been a disturbance.
“You’d be hard pressed to find land managers who wouldn’t be strongly in favor of protecting larger tracts because they’re more resilient to a variety of challenges, including invasive species and climate change,” McCallister said. “Once a property gets fragmented by roads, it’s easier to extract resources. It’s also easier for invasive species and pests to get a foothold.”
Nowosad said the study provides a data-driven model of long-term landscape change. While researchers only looked at changes between forest and agriculture, Nowosad said it would be worthwhile to examine whether tipping points exist for other landscape transitions.
“This model can be used to help understand how landscapes evolved and are going to evolve in the future,”

The Complete Story: UC study finds tipping point in deforestation

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