ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES ON DEFORESTATION IN AMAZONIA DURING THE PAST 30 YEARS

抄録

In Amazonia, about 8% of the rainforests disappeared from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. During that time, military governments cut down large areas of the rainforest to facilitate the construction of roads and settlements, and the opening of farms and pastures. Since the 1990s, research has investigated the effects of such deforestation on the environment, with assistance from conservation projects such as the Pilot Program for the Protection of the Tropical Forests of Brazil. The seminal work in this area was the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia. For more than 20 years, specialists in a wide range of scientific disciplines have conducted fieldwork, measurements, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations to examine vegetation and land-use monitoring, socio-economic change, forest fires, aerosol emissions, evapotranspiration, trace gas emissions, soil nutrition, soil carbon storage, carbon cycles, and terrestrial water budgets. Some issues and results related to these research efforts are briefly introduced in this paper.