**5. Conclusion**

Tropical forest coverage plays a vital role in climate regulation, biodiversity, and disease prevention. Following the analyses presented here, there are numerous avenues still to investigate and questions that need clarifying. For example, can such findings lead to more effective protection of park habitat given corruption in the current political climate? Will results encourage new funding opportunities to assess whether cocaine has entered protected park borders, or to study the extent to which drug crop eradication drives deforestation by progressively displacing drug farmers into new, more remote environments? [19, 20, 77]. Further steps should address how changes in forest loss associated with drugs can motivate policy for both conservation and enforcement, how governance corruption can be curbed to limit ties of criminal organizations with elements of police, army, government, and courts, and how landscape changes to primary forest can be reduced. Clearly, interdisciplinary approaches will be needed to understand and resolve conservation problems imposed by narcotraffic within Laguna del Tigre National Park; our analyses serve as an important step in characterizing ecological changes in this biodiversity hotspot.

## **Acknowledgements**

We acknowledge the use of imagery from the NASA Worldview application (https:// worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov), part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Appreciation is given to Universidad de San Carlos de

*Drugs and Biodiversity Loss: Narcotraffic-Linked Landscape Change in Guatemala DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107152*

Guatemala (Dirección General de Investigación and Centro Universitario de Zacapa), and the Center for Emerging Arthropod-borne and Zoonotic Pathogens (CeZAP) for a pilot grant awarded to GE. We are grateful to Luis E. Escobar for guidance on analysis, and Matthew Miller for providing input on initial drafts of the chapter.
