#Brazil #Amazonas #enviorment
Cutting down trees has been destroying large areas in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest for years. But researchers show another, equally damaging, but often overlooked problem: from 1992 to 2014, more areas were reused than cleared.
Cutting down trees has been destroying large areas in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest for years. But researchers show another, equally damaging, but often overlooked problem: from 1992 to 2014, more areas were reused than cleared.
During this period, this conversion alone - for example the felling of individual tree species or the burning of vegetation under the canopy - has lost an area almost the size of Germany,
write researchers working with Eraldo Matricardi from the University of Brasília in the magazine "Science". While deforestation means the complete conversion of the rainforest into another type of land - above all pastureland -
conversion takes place within the forests under the compact canopy and is characterized by the loss of biomass. In general, re-use is more difficult to record than deforestation,
because the burning down of low vegetation or the cutting down of certain species can hardly be seen under a canopy of leaves. The researchers had now specifically evaluated satellite images of the Amazon region in Brazil.
Compared to deforestation, this conversion is an often overlooked, permanent damage to the rainforest, the authors emphasize. It also contributes to climate change and species extinction, among other things.
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