Evaluating the current status of agriculture-driven deforestation across jurisdictional scales in the United States using foundational, federal datasets^*

Abstract Foundational forest and land-use change monitoring programs, with their statistical rigor and long-term baselines, are increasingly important to inform emerging global agricultural and forest commodity trade policies such as the European Union regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR). The EUDR requires national-scale information on deforestation prevalence as one component of deforestation risk assessments, with additional traceability and risk assessment requirements at the parcel scale for exports to the EU to comply with the regulation. To better understand potential implications of this policy and evaluate relevant monitoring data, we estimate area converted from forest to agricultural land use in the United States (US) using three authoritative data sources from US Department of Agriculture statistical programs: the Nationwide Forest Inventory, National Resources Inventory, and Crop Sequence Boundaries Data. Results from all three datasets consistently indicate that agriculture-driven gross deforestation has been minimal over the past decade in the US, averaging 0.01%–0.04% of forested area annually. Most of this land-use change is occurring in the Southeastern US with conversion to pasture being the most common agricultural conversion subcategory. The rarity of agriculture-driven deforestation results in high levels of uncertainty in county-scale estimates due to the low sample size and potential misclassification errors in modeled data. Nevertheless, comparing results from these three complementary datasets can provide greater confidence in fine-scale spatial patterns of past deforestation. This analysis highlights several challenges associated with implementing and enforcing trade policy based on land use categories. Given the low rate of agriculture-driven deforestation and potential difficulties with identifying land-use change at small spatial scales, trade policies focused solely on land use categories may have a limited benefit in countries such as the US where agriculture is not a major driver of deforestation.