Longitudinal Survey Data of Households in Ouro Preto do Oeste, Rondonia, Brazil, 1996-2019

Tropical deforestation is a striking form of land cover transformation resulting in a complex mosaic of shifting land-use patterns across space and time. Research on the underlying causes of forest conversion and the environmental consequences has been prolific, yet few scholars have assessed long term impacts on the socio-economic welfare of the frontier inhabitants along with the reciprocal effects of income and wealth on land use. Moreover, limited research addresses the impacts of these post-deforestation trajectories on employment, migration, and inequality. These lacunae are directly related to the difficulty of obtaining the spatial panel data required to track and evaluate these dynamic processes. Nevertheless, as the “old frontier” expands in tropical forest zones, it becomes critical to understand the dynamic economic and landscape processes that follow deforestation. This dataset provides opportunities to address these issues by adding a fifth round to a previous spatial panel survey of farm households in the heavily deforested state of Rondônia, Brazil.