A new study catalogs how environmental policies on deforestation, along with forest fires and drought, have affected plant and animal diversity in the Amazon rainforest.

For the study in Nature, researchers used records of more than 14,500 plant and vertebrate species to create biodiversity maps of the Amazon region. Overlaying the maps with historical and current observations of forest fires and deforestation over the last two decades allowed the team to quantify the cumulative impacts on the region’s species.

They found that since 2001, fires have affected between 40,000 and 73,400 square miles of Amazon rainforest, as well as 95% of all Amazonian species and as many as 85% of species that are listed as threatened in the region.

While forest management policies enacted in Brazil during the mid-2000s slowed the rate of habitat destruction, relaxed enforcement of those policies coinciding with a change in government in 2019 has seemingly begun to reverse the trend, the authors write.

“We show how policy has had a direct and enormous influence on the pace at which biodiversity across the entire Amazon has been affected,” says senior author Brian Enquist, a professor in the University of Arizona ecology and evolutionary biology department. He adds that the findings are especially critical in light of the fact that at no point in time did the Amazon get a break from those increasing impacts, which would have allowed for some recovery.

“Even with policies in place, which you can think of as a brake slowing the rate of deforestation, it’s like a car that keeps moving forward, just at a slower speed,” Enquist says. “But in 2019, it’s like the foot was let off the brake, causing it to accelerate again.”

Read the full article about Amazonian biodiversity by Daniel Stolte at Futurity.