Quantifying changes in the rates of forest clearing in Indonesia from 1990 to 2005 using remotely sensed data sets

By Matthew C. Hansen, Stephen V. Stehman, Peter V. Potapov, B. Arunarwati, F. Stolle, Kyle Pittman. 2009

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Timely and accurate data on forest change within Indonesia is required to provide government, private and civil society interests with the information needed to improve forest management. The forest clearing rate in Indonesia is among the highest reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), behind only Brazil in terms of forest area lost. While the rate of forest loss reported by FAO was constant from 1990 through 2005 (1.87 Mha yr−1), the political, economic, social and environmental drivers of forest clearing changed at the close of the last century. We employed a consistent methodology and data source to quantify forest clearing from 1990 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2005. Results show a dramatic reduction in clearing from a 1990s average of 1.78 Mha yr−1 to an average of 0.71 Mha yr−1 from 2000 to 2005. However, annual forest cover loss indicator maps reveal a near-monotonic increase in clearing from a low in 2000 to a high in 2005. Results illustrate a dramatic downturn in forest clearing at the turn of the century followed by a steady resurgence thereafter to levels estimated to exceed 1 Mha yr−1 by 2005. The lowlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan were the site of more than 70% of total forest clearing within Indonesia for both epochs; over 40% of the lowland forests of these island groups were cleared from 1990 to 2005. The method employed enables the derivation of internally consistent, national-scale changes in the rates of forest clearing, results that can inform carbon accounting programs such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) initiative.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8824e881cde97b69ceab62df887aa8468b946979

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity and Conservation of Tropical Peat Swamp Forests (2011, background): “Forest loss in the lowlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the two Indonesian provinces containing the largest areas of peat swamp forest, accounted for more than 70% of forest clearing in the country from 1990–2005, resulting in a staggering 41% loss in total area in just 15 years (Hansen et al. 2009).”
Oil Palm Boom and Land-Use Dynamics in Indonesia: The Role of Policies and Socioeconomic Factors (2015, background): “Several studies have analyzed land-use changes in oil palm hotspots using satellite images (Hansen et al., 2009; Koh et al., 2011; Carlson et al., 2012; Margono et al., 2012).”
Using presence‐only modelling to predict Asian elephant habitat use in a tropical forest landscape: implications for conservation (2010, methodology): “Vegetation productivity was measured as the relative greenness of a pixel which was calculated as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI, cf. Hansen et al., 2009a).”
Quantification of global gross forest cover loss (2010, background): “The annualized proportional GFCL for 2000–2005 in Indonesia reflects a reduction in GFCL when compared with estimates of GFCL for 1990–2000 (28).”
The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2012, unknown): “For our primary measure of deforestation, we use the MODIS satellite-based data, which captures both legal and illegal deforestation.”