The conclusions about the tropical deforestation literature in the previous six pages about the availability of information and patterns of causation must be tempered by the existence of approximately an additional one hundred studies which we still hope to obtain and read. While the addition of these studies may alter some of the less pronounced patterns in that data, we think it unlikely that they will alter the pronounced patterns that we have discussed above. Focusing for the moment on the patterns of information because these patterns interest FAO the most, we think that the uneven geographical distribution of high quality information about tropical deforestation represents a real problem whose overall contours will not change much when the additional studies become available. Similarly, the conclusions in the trends in the types of methods outlined in Table Two seem unlikely to change. Taken together, these two trends present an agency like FAO with an information management opportunity. By publicizing the uneven quality and quantity of information about tropical deforestation across nations, can FAO induce researchers to carry out studies of tropical forest covert change in places like Angola that would close these analytic gaps and, in so doing, improve our current system for monitoring changes in tropical forest cover?
1. The data and the codebook are available from the authors upon request.
2. The numbers of studies in Table Four exceeds the number of studies in Table Three because, while Table Three includes only those studies which have a clear geographical referent, Table Four includes all of those studies and the more abstract or global studies of deforestation which no clear geographical referent.
