PERU RELEASES DEFORESTATION DATA
Deforestation data opened up by the Peruvian government shows that the rate of forest clearing has slowed in recent years, though Peru's Amazon has lost more than 100,000 hectares annually since 2005. Overall, the area has gone from 80 to 78 percent forested from 2000. Peru's monitoring system, in development since 2009, is based mostly on satellite imagery and can detect changes as small as .09 hectares. "This is a big deal," said Greg Asner, a research at the Carnegie Institution for Science who has been working on the project.