Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest
Rondônia, Brazil
Rondônia, Brazil
The state of Rondônia is positioned in the southwestern part of the Brazilian Amazon and was originally almost entirely rainforest. Following the pavement of Highway 364 in 1985, 8% of the region was deforested for farming. By 2017, 33% of the state's forested land has been converted to pasture and agriculture. Rainforest in this region is at risk due to increasing economic pressures and the recent weakening of environmental agencies by Brazil's federal administration. The most significant contributor to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is beef production for export. This report shows the changes in land use that contribute to deforestation in the state of Rondônia.
The Amazon contains nearly one-third of all the tropical rainforests left on the Earth. Despite covering only around 1% of the planet’s surface, the Amazon is home to 10% of all the known wildlife species. In addition to its unparalleled diversity of life, the Amazon plays an essential role in helping to control the planet’s atmospheric carbon levels. The Amazon Basin stores approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon — that’s more than ten times the annual global emissions from fossil fuels. About 60 percent of the Amazon Basin is located in Brazil alone. Deforestation releases as much carbon into the atmosphere as the global transport sector and destroys the best carbon capture and storage technology we have today. This enormous release of carbon contributes to the magnified effects of anthropogenic global warming.
Statistics of land use transitions
The land use data used for this project was sourced from MapBiomas . MapBiomas is an initiative of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System (SEEG) from the Climate Observatory. It is produced by a collaborative network of co-creators made up of NGOs, universities, and technology companies organized by biomes and cross-cutting themes.
To highlight deforestation using the MapBiomas data, I choose the first year of data available and the last completed year in collection 3 to show the temporal and spatial changes in land use. Because the data came out in a raster file that only covered Brazil, I clipped the data to a polygon map note I created around the Brazilian Amazon. Below is a map of the Brazilian Amazon highlighting the changes seen from 1985-2017. The focus area of Rondônia is shaded to denote its location. Use the key in the bottom left corner of the map to see the classifications of land use.
Brazilian Amazon land use changes from 1985 (left) to 2017 (right)
The map below zooms in on the target area of this report. The state of Rondônia is a prime example of the socioeconomic pressures and policies that have led to the widespread deforestation of the Amazon since the 1970s. Colonization and settlement by Brazilian migrants began in this area after constructing a federal highway (BR-364). The main corridor running through the state surrounds the highway and has become an important agricultural production region for dairy, beef, and soy.
Rondônia land use changes from 1985 (left) to 2017 (right)
The following map shows deforestation corridors surrounded by protected areas. This protected area data was sourced from The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) on the ArcGIS Living Atlas. WDPA is the most comprehensive global database of marine and terrestrial protected areas. It is a joint project between the UN Environment Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The existing rainforest in Rondônia is primarily located in the protected areas that make up 45% of the state. Historically, protected areas have limited further deforestation, but recent legislative proposals are attempting to remove these protections to extract natural resources. Click a location on the map to see the area's name, the designation type, and the year protections went into place.
Land use and protected areas in Rondônia, 2017
This analysis showed the progression of deforestation in the state of Rondônia, Brazil. My current research looks into the effects of deforestation on regional climate. In future map projects, I plan to highlight these regional climate changes in a series of maps using data that has been refined using R programming.
The project aims to quantify the effects of deforestation on surface air temperature and precipitation in Rondônia, Brazil, by the year 2050 using a combination of observational, remote-sensing, and climate model data. Historical (1985-2015) climate and land-cover data will be used to generate statistical regression functions to map deforestation rate to changes in temperature and rainfall, which will be applied to the latest climate projections produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models to quantify the effects of forest conversion on the region’s future climate. The project will also estimate the impacts of future deforestation due to upcoming road constructions in the area.
Final Map Layout