‘Tradescapes’ in the Forest: Framing Infrastructure\u27s Relation to Territory, Commodities, and Flows

Pressure to facilitate the flow of commodities and capital across global and national markets has translated into narratives and programs prioritizing integration and development of forested regions. The 2009 World Bank Development Report argues that to reduce distance, infrastructure development is crucial. The infrastructure imperative, however, reworks a broader array of investment flows, property regimes, forest cover, and socio-political rights across scales as it drives increases in the speed of commodity extraction, production, mobility, and consumption. With illustrations from Amazonia and Selva Maya, the paper proposes ‘tradescapes’ as a useful framework to analyze infrastructure projects as part of multi-scalar mega-corridor networks and financial flows. Tradescapes transform relations between society, territory, and environment, with implications for infrastructure governance, resilience, and sustainability

Emerging hot spot analysis to indicate forest conservation priorities and efficacy on regional to continental scales: a study of forest change in Selva Maya 2000-2020

Despite the importance of preserving contiguous tropical forest areas to maintain biodiversity and terrestrial carbon stocks, methodological challenges continue to hinder broad-scale analysis of threats to these forests. Emerging Hot Spot Analysis (EHSA) is a spatial-statistical method that conveys complex information about the temporal dynamics of deforestation across a range of moderate to coarse spatial scales. Using Global Forest Change (GFC) data as inputs, EHSA produces spatially comprehensive, gridded outputs that represent a standardized, reproduceable way to instantiate contiguous forest tracts as spatial objects. Doing so allows aggregation of other GFC-derived values and analysis of alternative geographic configurations besides sub-national jurisdictions or protected areas, which can limit observation of finer scale variations. This paper illustrates the method’s utility to comprehensively characterize the magnitude and temporality of pressures facing the Selva Maya, a transboundary forest region with extensive areas under conservation that covers portions of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize