This report summarizes our recent eight month effort to inventory the literature on tropical deforestation. It describes our methods, presents findings about the current pattern of information about tropical deforestation, and summarizes the findings about patterns of causation in the literature. Approximately 50 studies of tropical deforestation appear annually in the literature. Slightly less than half of these publications rely on secondary sources, so strictly speaking they do not generate new information. Studies which employ remote sensing and household survey methods to generate high quality new information have, however, increased in the 1990s. The literature exhibits regional disparities in the coverage of different geographic areas in the tropical biome, with Central America and Southeast Asia receiving disproportionate amounts of attention and Central Africa receiving little attention. Places with high deforestation rates get studied more frequently while places with significant amounts of political unrest get studied less frequently. The causes of deforestation vary significantly by region, with fuelwood depletion being important in South Asia and East Africa, population important in South Asia and Africa, and ranching and road building important in Latin America. Logging and smallholder agriculture are important everywhere
