Parts of Amazon close to tipping point

The Mato Grosso, the most scarred region of the Amazon, is teetering on a deforestation “tipping point”, and may soon be on a one-way route to becoming a dry and relatively barren savannah.

Monica Carneiro Alves Senna and colleagues at the Federal University of Vicosa, Brazil, used computer models to simulate how the Amazon would recover from various amounts of deforestation. Their simulations ranged from a complete wipe-out of the entire forest to a situation where just one fifth of the forest would be removed

…When Senna and colleagues integrated a loss of soil quality into their models, the change was much more profound.

The Mato Grosso region in the southern Amazon