Tropical deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon

Landsat satellite images from the mid-1980s and early 1990s were used to map tropical forest extent and deforestation in similar to 800,000 km(2) of Amazonian Bolivia. Forest cover extent, including tropical deciduous forest, totaled 472,000 km(2) while the area of natural non-forest formations totaled 298,000 km(2). The area deforested totaled 15,000 km(2) in the middle 1980s and 28,800 km(2) by the early 1990s. The rate of tropical deforestation in the >1,000 mm y(-1) precipitation forest zone of Bolivia was 2,200 km(2) y(-1) from 1985-1986 to 1992-1994. We document a spatially-concentrated "deforestation zone" in Santa Cruz Department where >60% of the Bolivian deforestation is occurring at an accelerating rate in areas of tropical deciduous dry forest.