Aragão and Shimabukuro (Reports, 4 June 2010, p. 1275) reported that fires increase in agricultural frontiers even as deforestation decreases and concluded that these fires lead to unaccounted carbon emissions under the United Nations climate treaty’s tropical deforestation and forest degradation component. Emissions from post-deforestation management activities are, in fact, included in these estimates—but burning of standing forests is not.
Conversion to soy on the Amazonian agricultural frontier increases streamflow without affecting stormflow dynamics
Large-scale soy agriculture in the southern Brazilian Amazon now rivals deforestation for pasture as the region's predominant form of land use change. Such landscape-level change can have substantial consequences for local and regional hydrology, but these effects...