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 approximately 800,000 sq km of Amazonian Bolivia. Forest cover extent, including tropical deciduous forest, totalled 472,000 sq km while the area of natural non-forest formations totalled 298,000 sq km. The area deforested totalled 15,000 sq km in the middle 1980s and 28,800 sq km by the early 1990s. The rate of tropical deforestation in the >1,000 mm/y precipitation forest zone of Bolivia was 2,200 sq km/y 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.