Southern Amazon forest cover may fall to 20% by 2016

Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
Forest cover in the "Arc of Deforestation" of southern Amazonia will decline to around 20 percent 2016 due to continued logging and conversion of forests for cattle pasture and soy farms, report researchers writing in the journal Environmental Conservation. The results are independent of impacts resulting from climate change, which some researchers say could dry the Southern Amazon and turn it into a tinderbox.
… The results "indicate a critical threshold at 51% of forest cover in which landscape structure and connectivity changes abruptly." Now that forest cover has dipped below this level the authors believe cover will trend downwards. …
… Failing to curtail deforestation in the region will have significant ecological impacts and may impair the Brazilian government’s plan to promote sustainable development, the authors warn. "If observed deforestation probabilities remain unchanged, we predict that only 21% of the forest cover will remain in the study region by 2016, well below estimates of sustainable forest cover in the Amazon based on metrics of landscape structure, ecosystem services under future climate change scenarios, and current levels of bird and mammal species persistence," Michalski and colleagues write. "If current rates of deforestation continue in this region, the region will reach a critical point where local extinctions of forest species will rapidly accelerate."