Impact of deforestation worse than thought: researchers

In Brazil, German and Brazilian researchers have concluded that deforestation in tropical rain forests could have an even greater impact on climate change than has previously been thought. The combined biomass of a large number of small forest fragments left over after habitat fragmentation can be up to 40 per cent less than in a continuous natural forest of the same overall size.

The reason for the reduction in biomass is the higher mortality rate of trees at the edges of forest fragments, according to the results published by researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the University of São Paulo in Ecological Modelling. Simulation results suggest that a natural tropical forest contained approximately 250 tonnes of aboveground biomass per hectare, a forest fragment measuring 100 hectares has around 228 tonnes of biomass per hectare, while a patch of rain forest measuring one hectare has 140 tonnes of biomass per hectare.

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