Some Basic Concepts

Abstract

Any book about deforestation in any one country must begin with an overview of the data regarding deforestation worldwide and the problems inherent in those data. Important distinctions will be made between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ definitions of deforestation, between survey/satellite imagery and model-generated data, time series and cross-section data-analysis. This chapter will elucidate such distinctions and put them into a wider historical context. The explanation of forest loss on a global scale will set the stage for the more regional situations of Latin America, Ecuador and its highland regions in the rest of this book.