Credit: courtesy Gillian Galford
Using ten years of satellite data, researchers from the University of Vermont, Brown University and Woods Hole Research Center studied land use changes in the Cerrado’s Matopiba region, where the bulk of recent agricultural expansion has occurred. “This is the first study to show how intense the deforestation and agricultural expansion in the Cerrado has been in the past decade,” says Gillian Galford of the University of Vermont, co-author of the study in Global Change Biology. “It’s clearly a new hotspot for tropical deforestation.”