Fig. 1: Selected 0.5° grid cells for comparing climate averages between deforested and neighboring reference regions.

All these grid cells are entirely within the moist forest biome, had negligible forest loss over 2013–2021, and were grouped by their percentage of remaining forest cover in 2021 (≤40%, 40–60%, or 60–80% for deforested cells, and forest cover >80% for reference cells). The distribution of climate differences between deforested cells from each deforestation group versus reference neighboring cells was compared against the distribution of climate differences between reference versus reference neighboring cells, as also exemplified in the right panel. Reference cells in faded green were additionally used in a second assessment to generate, over the entire study region, 1000 random samples of 150 pairs of climate differences between reference versus reference neighbors. The original distribution of climate differences between deforested and reference neighbors was then compared against each of the 1000 distributions of random reference versus reference neighbors to assess the consistency of patterns from statistical tests. Ocean and terrain basemaps were obtained from Natural Earth.