Robert Masolele says he remembers being struck by how small-scale farmers in his native Tanzania cleared large areas of forest to grow lucrative crops of cotton and cashews. In an interview with Mongabay, the remote-sensing expert describes how this awareness later prompted him to map deforestation in Africa with a focus on how commodity crops for export drive forest loss. The research, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, yielded maps spanning 38 African countries. It’s an intricate and vast “tapestry,” as Masolele calls it, capturing in granular detail how humans make use of lands shorn of forests. While there’s already published work on the causes of forest loss in individual countries, the application derived from the paper allows users to identify the individual drivers of forest loss in Africa and their relative contribution — including cash crops. Masolele’s analysis showed that most of the deforestation across the continent is driven by small-scale agriculture. Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo are hotspots for this kind of deforestation, with more than 85% of forest loss in these countries attributed to small farms. But in countries like the Gambia, Niger, Sudan and Nigeria, Masolele found the largest swaths of woodland were cleared to create large-scale farms. In South Africa, the expansion of tree plantations constitutes a significant threat to native forests. In Somalia and South Sudan, forests are most likely to be cleared for pasture. Roads are intruding the most on Equatorial Guinea’s forests, while cacao is eating away into large…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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