Table 4.

Data sources and processing methods for biophysical, socioeconomic, and land cover explanatory variables

Variable	Data source and processing methods
Elevation	Gap-filled digital elevation data from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)48
Slope
Long-term mean annual temperature	WorldClim BIO Variables V149
Long-term mean annual precipitation
Global gridded per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP)	Extracted for 1992–2015; for years beyond 2015, data from 2015 was used due to the unavailability of more recent data50
Human Development Index
Average nightlight intensity	Average nightlight intensity extracted from consistent and corrected DMSP-OLS data for 1992-2013; VIIRS nightlights data was extracted for 2012–2020 and calibrated to DMSP-OLS as per the method of Li et al51. and Teo et al52. by spatially aggregating both VIIRS and DMSP-OLS to 1 km resolution, generating power regression models for the temporally overlapping mosaics, and using the average of the resulting coefficients to calibrate all VIIRS images53,54.
Population density	Extracted for 1992-2020 from the Global Human Settlement layer (GHSL)55
Percentage forest area	Derived from forest datasets as described in Table 3.
Percentage agricultural area	For consistency with forest datasets, we used: land cover classes 10 and 20 from the ESA CCI-LC where ESA CCI-LC was used for forest cover; Global Food Security-Support Analysis Data (GFSAD)56 where Hansen Global Forest Change was used for forest cover; and MODIS MCD12Q1.061 land cover class 12 where MODIS was used for forest cover.
Percentage land area occupied by mining land uses	Extracted for the year 2019, and applied to all years, based on the assumption that areas mined in the year 2019 generally represent areas with easily accessible and known mineral deposits which present an incentive for deforestation, and also because mining infrastructure tends to remain for decades57.
Percentage land area occupied by tree plantations	Tree plantations are distinct from natural forest, and may consist of tree crops such as oil palm, coffee, or coconut, or planted forests grown for wood production. Extracted for 1992–2020 from global map of planting years of plantations58.