Difficulties in tracking the long-term global trend in tropical forest area.

ABSTRACT: The long-term trend in tropical forest area receives less scrutiny than the tropical deforestation rate. We show that constructing a reliable trend is difficult and evidence for decline is unclear, within the limits of errors involved in making global estimates. A time series for all tropical forest area, using data from Forest Resources Assessments (FRAs) of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, is dominated by three successively corrected declining trends. Inconsistencies between these trends raise questions about their reliability, especially because differences seem to result as much from errors as from changes in statistical design and use of new data. A second time series for tropical moist forest area shows no apparent decline. The latter may be masked by the errors

SUBMITTER: Grainger A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2206620 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature