The world’s remaining large forests are fragmenting at an alarming rate, and the degradation in Canada leads the world according to a new analysis. Source: CBC News
The degradation of such pristine “intact” forests threatens species such as Canada’s woodland caribou and Asia’s tigers that rely on huge unbroken expanses of natural ecosystems in order to survive, said Nigel Sizer, global director of forest programs with the World Resources Institute, a Washington, DC based research institute focused on resource sustainability.
This week, the group, along with its collaborators, released a new global map of intact forest landscapes, along with an analysis of how those landscapes have changed since the year 2000.
The maps are available as part of the institute’s Global Forest Watch online forest monitoring and alert system.
The satellite mapping analysis led by Peter Potapov, an associate professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland, showed that more than 104 million hectares of the world’s remaining intact forests – an area about the size of Ontario – were degraded between 2000 to 2013.
Such forests are considered degraded when they are broken up or fragmented into smaller pieces that are no longer the same kind of ecosystem.
Sizer called the amount of degradation a “shocking number.”
“What is lost is the intactness… This is a process which results in biodiversity loss — particularly, farranging species will no longer be able to survive,” said Christoph Thies, senior forest campaigner for Greenpeace International, which contributed to the research through its Greenpeace GIS (geographic information systems) Laboratory.
The research partnership also included the conservation group WWF-Russia and Transparent World, a Moscow-based non-profit that helps other groups use space imagery for research and education.
In this case, free public satellite images provided by the US Geological Survey Landsat program in partnership with NASA were analyzed.
The area degraded during the study period represents about 8% of remaining intact forests.
Roads and logging were blamed In general, new roads and logging appear to drive the fragmentation of intact forests around the world, Thiens said.
In tropical regions, fires used to clear land for agriculture and pasturing are also a major cause of forest degradation. However, Thies said more research and analysis needs to be done on the factors that lead to the degradation and fragmentation of intact forests.
He recommended that in order to protect large forests from further degradation, governments should: Establish more protected areas.
In the meantime, the team hopes their new maps will help companies concerned about sustainability determine which areas to avoid when sourcing both forest products such as timber and agricultural products such as palm oil, beef and soy, which are often produced on land being cleared of trees at the edges of forests.
Potapov said the research team has already published its methodology and some regional monitoring results in the scientific literature, but is working on a peer-review publication about the analysis, to be submitted before the end of the year.
WRI’s Global Forest Watch tool was named this week as one of two winners of the United Nations Big Data Climate Challenge.
