Titling indigenous communities protects forests in the Peruvian Amazon.

Community land titles alone will not protect forests.

Blackman et al. (1) assess the forest cover impacts of providing indigenous Peruvian communities with formal title to land they have long inhabited. We applaud the authors’ use of high-quality forest change data and rigorous causal methods; both are critical gaps in the land tenure and forest change literature (2). Their findings are encouraging, especially given Peru’s globally important biodi...

Land-use allocation protects the Peruvian Amazon.

Disturbance and deforestation have profound ecological and socioeconomic effects on tropical forests, but their diffuse patterns are difficult to detect and quantify at regional scales. We expanded the Carnegie forest damage detection system to show that, between 1999 and 2005, disturbance and deforestation rates throughout the Peruvian Amazon averaged 632 square kilometers per year and 645 squ...

Reply to Robinson et al.: Building the evidence base on the forest cover effects of community titling.

We thank Robinson et al. (1) for their thoughtful comments on our article (2). We agree with their main point, which is that our findings about the link between titling and forest cover change are contextand time-specific, and do not necessarily generalize to other countries and other periods. However, it is important to make clear that our article (2): (i ) does not claim to present generaliza...

Author's response to reviews Title: Easier said than done: applying the Ecohealth principles to a study of heavy metals exposure among indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon Authors:

A second hydrocarbon boom threatens the Peruvian Amazon: trends, projections, and policy implications

The Peruvian Amazon is home to extraordinary biological and cultural diversity, and vast swaths of this mega-diverse region remain largely intact. Recent analysis indicates, however, that the rapid proliferation of oil and gas exploration zones now threatens the region’s biodiversity, indigenous peoples, and wilderness areas. To better elucidate this dynamic situation, we analyzed official Peru...