Buffer zones in the Peruvian Amazon bring conservation benefits despite ambiguous rules and uncertain authority

Includes Figures, Tables, Charts, Maps, Appendix and Bibliography. Text in English, Spanish.Many geographers have tested whether protected areas save forest, but they usually focus on parks and reserves, management units that have internationally recognized standing and familiar objectives. Buffer zones have received considerably less attention because of their ambiguous rules and often informal designation. Although buffer zones are often dismissed as an ineffective conservation tool, their prevalence in the Amazon and especially in Peru (where they cover over 10% of the country) calls for increased attention. This study examines the effectiveness of buffer zones in the Peruvian Amazon to: a) prevent deforestation and b) limit the extent of extractive concessions (a primary goal of buffer zone legislation). I employ annual deforestation data from the Hansen et al (2013) Global Forest Change dataset with covariate matching to determine the impact of 13 buffer zones on deforestation from 2007-2012. I find that despite uncertainty in management authority, buffer zones are associated with fewer extractive concessions and less deforestation. To understand causality of the result I draw on interviews with government officials and NGO employees in Lima and around the Tambopata National Reserve, the site of my case study. The approval process for extractive concessions in buffer zones appear to slow legal extractive activities, but management of illegal activities is ambiguous and less effective. In the Tambopata National Reserve, buffer zone managers have been unable to control the boom of illegal gold mining within the buffer zone. These results call for increased clarity in management rules and more research into the potential role of buffer zones as a conservation strategy

Forest disturbance alerts for the Congo Basin using Sentinel-1

A humid tropical forest disturbance alert using Sentinel-1 radar data is presented for the Congo Basin. Radar satellite signals can penetrate through clouds, allowing Sentinel-1 to provide gap-free observations for the tropics consistently every 6–12 days at 10 m spatial scale. In the densely cloud covered Congo Basin, this represents a major advantage for the rapid detection of small-scale forest disturbances such as subsistence agriculture and selective logging. Alerts were detected with latest available Sentinel-1 images and results are presented from January 2019 to July 2020. We mapped 4 million disturbance events during this period, totalling 1.4 million ha with nearly 80% of events smaller than 0.5 ha. Monthly distribution of alert totals varied widely across the Congo Basin countries and can be linked to regional differences in wet and dry season cycles, with more forest disturbances in the dry season. Results indicated high user's and producer's accuracies and the rapid confirmation of alerts within a few weeks. Our disturbance alerts provide confident detection of events larger than or equal to 0.2 ha but do not include smaller events, which suggests that disturbance rates in the Congo Basin are even higher than presented in this study. The new alert product can help to better study the forest dynamics in the Congo Basin with improved spatial and temporal detail and near real-time detections, and highlights the value of dense Sentinel-1 time series data for large-area tropical forest monitoring. The research contributes to the Global Forest Watch initiative in providing timely and accurate information to support a wide range of stakeholders in sustainable forest management and law enforcement. The alerts are available via the https://www.globalforestwatch.org and http://radd-alert.wur.nl