By Malavika Vyawahare Robert Masolele says he remembers being struck by how small-scale farmers in his native Tanzania cleared large areas of forest to grow lucrative crops of cotton and cashews. In an interview with Mongabay, the remote-sensing expert describes how this awareness later prompted him to map deforestation in Africa with a focus on how commodity crops for export drive forest loss. The research, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, yielded maps spanning 38 African countries. It’s an intricate and vast “tapestry,” as Masolele calls it, capturing in granular detail ho…