Eugenio Y. Arima

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Texas at Austin

The number of arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border has increased dramatically over the past five years. To accommodate this increased flow, the Biden administration introduced a new program that allows migrants from ‘non-deportable’ countries - Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) - the opportunity to apply for parole while still in their hom...

Climate change and land use change are two main drivers of global biodiversity decline, decreasing the genetic diversity that populations harbour and altering patterns of local adaptation. Landscape genomics allows measuring the effect of these anthropogenic disturbances on the adaptation of populations. However, both factors have rarely been consi...

Forest management aimed at the sustainable use of forest resources is an alternative land use to deforestation and can improve forest conservation in tropical regions. The construction of forest infrastructure, including forest roads, skid trails, and log-landings, is a key factor in minimizing the impacts and forest disturbances typically caused b...

This study explores the hazards associated with making land-use decisions based on current climatology in regions where projected increases in temperature and reductions in water availability are anticipated to pose significant challenges to rainfed agriculture in the Brazilian Cerrado biome. We modeled future farmland expansion and how that matche...

The rapid expansion of avocado cultivation in Michoacán, Mexico, is one of the drivers of deforestation. We assessed the degree of fragmentation and functional connectivity of the remaining temperate forest within the Avocado Belt and prioritized patches that contribute the most to connectivity using a network-based approach and modelling different...

Brazil is one of the largest suppliers of commodities in the world, partly due to the agricultural expansion in the Cerrado biome that began in the 1970s. However, as areas with better soil and climate for agriculture become scarce, farmers advanced to marginal lands, where precipitation is less reliable for rainfed crops. The overall goal of this...

The Caribbean has displayed a capacity to fulfill climate change projections associated with tropical cyclone-related rainfall and flooding. This article describes the hydrometeorological characteristics of Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico in September 2022 in terms of measured and interpolated rainfall and observed peak flows relative to previous tr...

Sediment mobilization by rain-driven landslides tends to be responsible for the relatively high sediment yields of high-standing islands within tropical cyclone corridors where sediments represent a threat to water reservoirs and marine environments such as coral reefs. An opportunity to quantify sediment releases and delivery to streams by shallow...

Humans place strong pressure on land and have modified around 75% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. In this context, ecoregions and biomes, merely defined on the basis of their biophysical features, are incomplete characterizations of the territory. Land system science requires classification schemes that incorporate both social and biophysical dimen...

As demand for avocado climbs, avocado production in Michoacán - Mexico’s biggest avocado growing region - expands into new places. We use a spatial probit model to project the geographic distribution of likely future avocado expansion and analyze those results to determine (1) threats to specific forest types and (2) how the distribution of avocado...

As demand for avocado climbs, avocado production in Michoacán - Mexico’s biggest avocado growing region - expands into new places. We use a spatial probit model to project the geographic distribution of likely future avocado expansion and analyze those results to determine (1) threats to specific forest types and (2) how the distribution of avocado...

The trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur countries will increase deforestation in the Mercosur countries and Brazil, in particular, if ratified by member countries. We use a computable general equilibrium model to analyze how trade, land use, and agricultural production will change as a result of the agreement. We then use a...

Peak streamflow rates from the Insular Caribbean have received limited attention in worldwide catalogues in spite of their potential for exceptionality given many of the islands’ steep topographic relief and proneness to high rainfall rates associated with tropical cyclones. This study compiled 1922 area-normalized peak streamflow rates recorded du...

The role of individual tropical cyclones in mobilizing sediment by shallow landsliding has been studied widely in islands of the Pacific but hardly within the Insular Caribbean. An opportunity to conduct such a study materialized in 2017 when Hurricane María provoked over 70,000 landslides on the island of Puerto Rico. Through aerial photo interpre...

Avocados have become a global commodity, and environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the regions where avocados are grown have increased in tandem with production. In this article, we synthesize the current state of knowledge about the impacts of avocado production in Michoacán, México, the global center of avocado production. Environmental impa...

The report estimates the potential impact of the EU-Mercosur trade agreement on deforestation. It shows that deforestation could increase in the Mercosur countries due the increased demand for agricultural products (Chapter 1) and could affect sensitive regions in Brazil, including areas neighboring indigenous lands and conservation units (Chapter...

To say that Covid-19 has changed everything about how we do geography is by now cliche. Multiple academic journals, including this one, have published special issues on Covid-19, and countless editorials signal how the on-going pandemic deepens existing inequalities, not only in the worlds we study as scholars but also in the ways in which we produ...

• The extent and intensity of impacts of multiple new dams in the Amazon basin on specific biological groups are potentially large, but still uncertain and need to be better understood. • It is known that river disruption and regulation by dams may affect sediment supplies, river channel migration, floodplain dynamics, and, as a major adverse conse...

Rainfall associated with Hurricane María triggered more than 70,000 shallow landslides over a 6,400 km² area of Puerto Rico for a mean density of 11.2 slope failures per km². When compared to other single storm landslide inventories with similarly sized search areas in tropical and sub-tropical regions, HMA’s mean landslide density is eleven times...

The Journal of Latin American Geography is happy to announce a newly expanded editorial team, including the addition of three new Associate Editors and a new Book Review Editor.

The 2018 Chinese tariffs on US soybean contributed to a significant restructuring of the global soybean trade. The new tariff structure effectively created a subtle but significant increase in prices for non-US soybeans. Here we show that the new tariffs are likely to lead to land use change and new greenhouse gas emissions abroad. Notably, we show...

Since 1984, nearly 1,000 people have been killed in the Brazilian Amazon due to land conflicts stemming from unequal distribution of land, land tenure insecurity, and lawlessness. During this same period, the region experienced almost complete deforestation (< 8% forest cover by 2010). Land conflict exacts a human toll, but it also affects agents’...

The effects of global climate change on the intensity of tropical cyclones are yet to be fully understood due to the variety of factors that affect storm intensity, the limited time spans of existing records, and the diversity of metrics by which intensity is characterized. The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season induced record-breaking economic l...

A new threat now confronts the Amazon in the form of a massive infrastructure program, the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, or IIRSA. This article presents results of a projection analysis showing that IIRSA could push the Amazonian forest past a ‘‘tipping point,’’ replacing it with tropical savanna. S...

The Brazilian Cerrado, one of the most threatened biomes of our planet, illustrates the challenges and opportunities of reconciling economic development with conservation of land and water ecosystems. Here, we assess the state of the art of and present new information on the impacts of agricultural expansion, dams, and water use, and make recommend...

This article considers Amazonian environmental change by focusing on political and economic processes in a place-specific context with far-reaching global implications. In particular, we consider the destruction of the Brazil nut forest (BNF) in the lower basin. The Brazil nut tree yields a valuable nontimber forest product, and its loss raises con...

en This article presents a 21st Century agenda for Amazonian conservation. The agenda calls for developing a system of refugia and a scientific methodology for predicting impacts of the infrastructure development vision for the region. It also calls for a collaborative approach to conservation planning, in the interest of fruitful engagement with d...

In recent decades, soybean production has expanded rapidly across areas of South America. This expansion has been broadly credited to rising soybean returns, and the technical innovations and demand side growth that have raised farm prices or farmers' profit margins. In this letter we argue that recent agricultural expansions in South America would...

To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers. Impacts varied predictably with prior development – prior roads and prior deforestation – and, further, in a pattern that suggests a potential synergy...

Although bioenergy is a renewable energy source, it is not without impact on the environment. Both the cultivation of crops specifically for use as biofuels and the use of agricultural byproducts to generate energy changes the landscape, affects ecosystems, and impacts the climate. Bioenergy and Land Use Change focuses on regional and global assess...

This chapter considers the theoretical conditions in the spatial economy that may lead to indirect land use change (ILUC) in Brazil. We analyze the expansion of soybean and sugarcane agriculture for biofuel production and their encroachment on existing pastures, displacing them to the Amazonian frontier. ILUC can arise (i) by market impacts on comm...

More than a hundred hydropower dams have already been built in the Amazon basin and numerous proposals for further dam constructions are under consideration. The accumulated negative environmental effects of existing dams and proposed dams, if constructed, will trigger massive hydrophysical and biotic disturbances that will affect the Amazon basin’...

Our recent article, “Are Brazil’s Deforesters Avoiding Detection?” demonstrated that focusing illegal deforestation enforcement on the subset of forest monitored by the flagship PRODES system has caused PRODES to capture a declining share of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Deforesters may be purposively seeking out forests not monitored for...

Rates of deforestation reported by Brazil's official deforestation monitoring system have declined dramatically in the Brazilian Amazon in recent years. Much of Brazil's success in its fight against the clearing of monitored forests stems from a series of policy changes put into place between 2004 and 2008. In this research we suggest that one of t...

Researchers, NGOs, and the Brazilin government have paid significant attention to the preservation of Brazil’s natural landscapes. As a result, more than 25 million ha have been added to the system of protected areas in the region. However, the size and legal status of many protected areas throughout the Brazilian Amazon are being eroded. Understan...

Reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is now a vital component in climate change mitigation strategies. Global initiatives such as REDD+ are receiving growing investments, and in-country policy makers are under pressure to protect intact forests. In 2008, Brazil met these pressures by making deforestation reduction a c...

Tropical forests are now at the center stage of climate mitigation policies worldwide given their roles as sources of carbon emissions resulting from deforestation and forest degradation. Although the international community has created mechanisms such as REDD+ to reduce those emissions, developing tropical countries continue to invest in infrastru...

Distributions and parameters used in the Bayesian spatial probit model. (PDF)

Amazonian deforestation has declined recently, but Brazil’s infrastructure plans continue to target the region. In the interest of sustainable development, this article engages the spatial discourses in conservation planning and landscape ecology. It does so by addressing fishbone fragmentation, commonly observed in development frontiers in Brazil....

Unlike coastal wetlands, large tropical rivers' wetlands present a dry and flooded annual phase that follows the hydrologic pulse. Mapping such wetlands with passive remote sensors is challenging due to the dense tropical vegetation and cloud cover that block the understory water reflectance. In this study, we use NASA-JPL's full polarized UAVSAR-L...

Abstract Amazonian deforestation has declined recently, but Brazil’s infrastructure plans continue to target the region. In the interest of sustainable development, this article engages the spatial discourses in conservation planning and landscape ecology. It does so by addressing fishbone fragmentation, commonly observed in development frontiers i...

Although vast literature exists on the drivers of tropical deforestation and its ecological consequences, less is known about how patterns of forest fragmentation emerge in the first place. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue for the Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin by analyzing the social processes generative of five specific p...

Given growing concerns about biodiversity loss and carbon emissions stemming from tropical deforestation, it is important to identify the factors associated with land abandonment as they might indicate areas that were deforested but are unsuitable for long-term cultivation. This article utilizes a high resolution, Landsat-based dataset called Terra...

Soybean farming has brought economic development to parts of South America, as well as environmental hopes and concerns. A substantial hope resides in the decoupling of Brazil's agricultural sector from deforestation in the Amazon region, in which case expansive agriculture need not imply forest degradation. However, concerns have also been voiced...

Photo 1. Roads: the bane of the Amazonian Forest. These are improvements being made rapidly to the "Soy Highway," or BR-163, which is irreversibly opening the entire central basin in Pará State to agricultural development. Photo credit: Robert Walker. Our study addresses emergent forest fragmentation resulting from logging road networks, with suppo...

This article addresses the emergence of road networks and forest fragmentation in Central Amazônia, which has been impacted by both spontaneous and planned settlement. The first objective of the article is to broaden the discussion of fragmentation by addressing social processes that generate it through the construction of roads. Roads impact land...

A methodology for judging the performance of simulation models that involve linear features is presented taking as its test case a model that produces logging road networks. The approach combines existing methods of accuracy assessment, based on the so-called epsilon band, with the principle of statistical inference. This requires adapting neutral...

A methodology for judging the performance of simulation models that involve linear features is presented taking as its test case a model that produces logging road networks. The approach combines existing methods of accuracy assessment, based on the so-called epsilon band, with the principle of statistical inference. This requires adapting neutral...

This article addresses the spatial decision-making of loggers and implications for forest fragmentation in the Amazon basin. It provides a behavioral explanation for fragmentation by modeling how loggers build road networks, typically abandoned upon removal of hardwoods. Logging road networks provide access to land, and the settlers who take advant...

Global demand for food and energy will increase in the next decades as world population grows, incomes in developing countries rise, and new energy sources from biofuels are sought. Despite gains in productivity, much of the future demand for those agricultural products will be met by bringing new lands into production. Tropical forests, and in par...

This chapter addresses the opening of Amazônia, which was driven in large part by the construction and improvement of federal highways in a series of megaprojects. It focuses on the most famous of these, the Transamazon Highway, and considers the environmental, cultural, and economic impacts arising in the aftermath of its inauguration in the early...

This article deploys the "Theater of Cruelty," articulated by the French surrealist Antonin Artaud, as a conceptual heuristic to explicate the empirical world of contemporary Amazonia, in particular the " South of Para," a site of land war and forest destruction, which the Theater of Cruelty posits as a single dramatic event. We pursue this explica...

Expansion of global demand for soy products and biofuel poses threats to food security and the environment. One environmental impact that has raised serious concerns is loss of Amazonian forest through indirect land use change (ILUC), whereby mechanized agriculture encroaches on existing pastures, displacing them to the frontier. This phenomenon ha...

Summary The present paper considers a sometimes contentious process of land reform presently occurring in Brazil. This process, referred to in the paper as Direct Action Land Reform (DALR), involves organizations such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) and more spontaneous actions of indivi...

The present paper describes the contentious process of settlement formation of a particular type of land reform settlement, which we call "spontaneous" direct action land reform. In addition, the paper place the settlement formation process within a land cover and land use framework by describing the underlying processes that lead to spontaneous se...

This paper seeks to understand how the Brazilian Amazon, which many thought unsuitable for agricultural development, has yielded to a dynamic cattle economy in only a few decades. It does so by embedding the Thunian model of location rents within the regime of capital accumulation that has driven the Brazilian economy since the mid-20th century. Th...

This article addresses climate-tipping points in the Amazon Basin resulting from deforestation. It applies a regional climate model to assess whether the system of protected areas in Brazil is able to avoid such tipping points, with massive conversion to semiarid vegetation, particularly along the south and southeastern margins of the basin. The re...

Charcoal evidence suggests that fires in Amazonian forests were an infrequent agent of forest disturbance prior to the twentieth century. However, the spatial and temporal distribution of fires changed dramatically during the past few decades. Fire has become one of the driving forces of land use and land cover change in Amazonia. Increasing human...

In this article, we simulate forest fragmentation patterns by reference to the actual decision-making of the agents engaged in the fragmentation process itself. We take as our empirical case fragmentation in the Brazilian Amazon basin associated with road-building by loggers. Roads built by the private sector, particularly loggers, play a decisive...

It is obvious that roads facilitate access to natural resources. It is less clear, however, why the “spatial structure” of road networks varies among locations in tropical forest frontiers, which bears implications for the “spatial geometry” of forest fragmentation and the sustainability of resource-based development. We present a comparati...

O sul do Pará, localizado no coração da Amazônia brasileira, tornou- se famoso devido à violência da luta pela terra. Apesar da longa história acerca de conflitos agrários, no Brasil, e seus diversos impactos nas variadas regiões do país, a violência é mais grave e persistente nessa área. O objetivo do presente artigo é examinar as razões disso. Es...

This article describes a quantitative assessment of the output from the Behavioral Landscape Model (BLM), which has been developed to simulate the spatial pattern of deforestation (i.e. forest fragmentation) in the Amazon basin in a manner consistent with human behavior. The assessment consists of eighteen runs for a section of the Transamazon High...

The South of Pará, located in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, has become notorious for violent land struggle. Although land conflict has a long history in Brazil, and today impacts many parts of the country, violence is most severe and persistent here. The purpose of this article is to examine why. Specifically, we consider how a particular Amaz...

This article implements a spatially explicit model to estimate the probability of forest and agricultural fires in the Brazilian Amazon. We innovate by using variables that reflect farm-gate prices of beef and soy, and also provide a conceptual model of field management and deforestation fires to simulate the impact of road-paving, cattle exports,...

1] Using a spatially-explicit model, we have projected potential Amazon landscapes based on two possible development scenarios and total forest removal to represent uncertainty in future land cover. We conducted Monte Carlo simulations with a regional climate model driven by these landscapes and by different years to include atmospheric uncertainty...

Unofficial roads form dense networks in landscapes, generating a litany of negative ecological outcomes, but in frontier areas they are also instrumental in local livelihoods and community development. This trade-off poses dilemmas for the governance of unofficial roads. Unofficial road building in frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon illustrates...

Roads have manifold social and environmental impacts, including regional development, social conflicts and habitat fragmentation. ‘Road ecology’ has emerged as an approach to evaluate the various ecological and hydrological impacts of roads. This article aims to complement road ecology by examining the socio-spatial processes of road building itsel...