Tropical deforestation is an example of geochange with massive impacts to the environment locally and globally. In the Brazilian Amazon deforestation has prevailed owing mostly to private investments in agricultural expansion, associated with large-scale cattle ranching, smallscale subsistence farming and soybeans expansion. Data on deforestation have been relied mostly on satellite remote sens...

The formalization of rural people’s rights to agricultural and forest land is a key policy focus for many developing countries (Larson et al. 2010; Deininger and Hilhorst 2013). These reforms can improve marginalized people’s wellbeing by securing their hold on durable income-yielding assets, especially where land ownership is culturally prized (Holden et al. 2013; Lawry et al. 2014). However, ...