The primary rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon has come under a brutal assault by small-scale gold mining, which has razed trees from more than 170,000 acres of woodland over the past five years.
The new research by scientists at Wake Forest University's Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation combined two techniques to measure the forest loss with 20-25 percent more accuracy than previous methods, notes New Atlas.
The consequences of small-scale gold mining are catastrophic for the forest as miners don’t look for rich zones of ore but keep stripping the land of trees in search of tiny flakes of gold, which are then extracted using toxic mercury, writes Science Daily. Detecting small-scale gold mining from satellites is tricky as images of ravaged forest lands are similar to what natural wetlands look like.