Sentence:  Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the <WSD>deforestation</WSD> of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  The process of destroying a forest and replacing it with something else, especially with an agricultural system. (from 1874)