Fig. 3: Relative climate differences between deforested cells and their reference neighboring cells.

Values indicate the percentage difference in climate averages during 2013–2021 between deforested cells against their reference neighboring cells. Deforested cells were grouped by their remaining forest cover in 2021. Forest cover in reference cells was >80%. Upper and lower boundaries of each box indicate the third and first quartiles of the distributions. Horizontal lines indicate the median, and cross marks the mean. Points show values beyond the first and third quartiles. Letters at the bottom represent the comparison among deforestation groups based on pairwise Welch’s t-test at the 0.05 level. LST stands for land surface temperature, ET for evapotranspiration, and Max. for maximum. Number of pairwise differences: 17 for ≤40% forest cover versus reference, 30 for 40–60% forest cover versus reference, and 163 for 60–80% forest cover versus reference.