Second, the proportional share of medium and large-scale deforestation declines at first, but rebounds during the observation period in all frontier types after 2012 -casting doubts on the long-term sustainability of current conservation governance approaches in Brazil. First, contemporary frontier development is characterized by an intensification of cattle ranching and an increasing share of agricultural activities in local production portfolios, which could be the result of better access to modern technologies and markets combined with forest governance induced scarcity of land for expansion of historically dominant extensive pasture systems. We observed two types of transformative processes at deforestation frontiers in the Amazonian context. Its theoretical framework performs well in explaining broad variations in scope, context, and agents of land use and land cover change across different frontier regions. It seeks to contribute to the LULCC-policy debate by applying frontier theory insights to map, quantify, and compare land cover dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon between 20. The second part of this study operates on the meso-scale by comparing LULCC trends in different deforestation frontiers. These findings suggest that LULCC research can benefit from improved and context-specific accessibility measurements. The results suggest that (1) the difference between wet and dry season accessibility (due to road quality) is an important determinant of pasture and cropland expansion, and (2) that different measures of infrastructure access (e.g., distance to markets versus distance to towns or processing facilities) can explain different aspects of LULCC. It adopts a regression model to explain the geographical distribution of pasture and crop expansion in the Brazilian Amazon using different accessibility measures and a panel-dataset with land cover information. It demonstrates how different concepts and measurements of accessibility can result in considerably different LULCC predictions.

The first part of this study focuses on the role of accessibility for LULCC on the macro scale. It uses several analytical approaches on the micro-, meso- and macro-scale, and goes beyond the scope of classical deforestation studies by considering many forms of LULCC, including pasture to crop conversion and agricultural intensification. This thesis contributes to the science policy-debate about deforestation in the tropics by studying infrastructure access and environmental governance in the Brazilian Amazon. To mitigate these impacts, the goal of drastically reducing tropical deforestation has been a fundamental part of BrazilвЂ™s national climate and biodiversity conservation strategies, which were reaffirmed on a global scale as a key part of the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement. Deforestation of tropical rainforests contributes significantly to global climate change and accelerated biodiversity loss.

Model broken roads