<title>Tropical deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon</title>

Landsat satellite images from the mid-1980s and early 1990s were used to map tropical forest extent and deforestation in approximately 800,000 km² of Amazonian Bolivia. Forest cover extent, including tropical deciduous forest, totaled 472,000 km² while the area of natural non-forest formation totaled 298,000 km². The area deforested totaled 15,000 km² in the middle 1980s and 28,800 km² by the early 1900s. The rate of tropical deforestation in the > 1,000 mm y^-1 precipitation forest zone of Bolivia was 2,200 km² y^-1 from 1985-1986 to 1992-1994. We document a spatially-concentrated 'deforestation zone' in Santa Cruz Department where > 60 percent of the Bolivian deforestation is occurring at an accelerating rate in areas of tropical deciduous dry forest.