Mapping the World's Intact Forest Landscapes by Remote Sensing

By Peter V. Potapov, A. Yaroshenko, Svetlana Turubanova, M. Dubinin, L. Laestadius, Christoph Thies, D. Aksenov, A. Egorov, Yelena S. Yesipova, I. Glushkov and 5 more. 2008

496 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Protection of large natural forest landscapes is a highly important task to help fulfill different international strategic initiatives to protect forest biodiversity, to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to stimulate sustainable forest management practices. This paper introduces a new approach for mapping large intact forest landscapes (IFL), defined as an unbroken expanse of natural ecosystems within areas of current forest extent, without signs of significant human activity, and having an area of at least 500 km 2. We have created a global IFL map using existing fine-scale maps and a global coverage of high spatial resolution satellite imagery. We estimate the global area of IFL within the current extent of forest ecosystems (forest zone) to be 13.1 million km 2 or 23.5% of the forest zone. The vast majority of IFL are found in two biomes: Dense Tropical and Subtropical Forests (45.3%) and Boreal Forests (43.8%). The lowest proportion of IFL is found in Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests. The IFL exist in 66 of the 149 countries that together make up the forest zone. Three of them—Canada, Russia, and Brazil—contain 63.8% of the total IFL area. Of the world's IFL area, 18.9% has some form of protection, but only 9.7% is strictly protected, i.e., belongs to IUCN protected areas categories I-III. The world IFL map presented here is intended to underpin the development of a general strategy for nature conservation at the global and regional scales. It also defines a baseline for monitoring deforestation and forest degradation that is well suited for use with operational and cost-effective satellite data. All project results and IFL maps are available on a dedicated web site (http://www.intactforests.org).

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d38a4ebc478672cf60a238b34fc9a75cc7972034

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Citations in the corpus

Forest Resources Assessment of 2015 shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries (2015, background): “Human pressures have increasingly isolated PAs and other intact forests (DeFries et al., 2005; Potapov et al., 2008).”
An integrated pan‐tropical biomass map using multiple reference datasets (2016, methodology): “The intact landscapes were defined according to the Intact Forest Landscape (IFL) map for the year 2000 (Potapov et al., 2008).”
Increasing human dominance of tropical forests (2015, background): “Dark green represents Intact Forest Landscapes, 95% of which are evergreen forests (28).”
Estimating the world's potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach (2013, unknown): “undisturbed forests (Potapov et al., 2008) – or one of the 200 ecoregions with a high conservation value and level of threat (Olson and Dinerstein, 1998).”
What causes deforestation in Indonesia? (2019, background): “IFLs are contiguous forests with no signs of anthropogenic disturbance detectable via remotely sensed imagery and large enough to maintain populations of wideranging species (Potapov et al 2008).”
What are the limits to oil palm expansion (2016, unknown): “For this purpose, we use the Intact Forest Landscape dataset that maps old growth forests with a minimum area of 20,000 ha (Potapov et al., 2008).”
Measurement and monitoring needs, capabilities and potential for addressing reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation under REDD+ (2015, methodology): “…local-scale assessments of degradation using approaches that incorporate more indirect indicators of degradation, such as buffers around or distances from villages and roads (including logging roads) or proximity to previous forest clearing (Potapov et al 2008, Herold et al 2011, GOFC-GOLD 2014).”
Patterns, Causes, and Consequences of Anthropocene Defaunation (2016, background): “Only 12% of the world’s dense tropical forests are sufficiently far from roads, rivers, or settlements to be assumed to experience low defaunation rates (Potapov et al. 2008).”
Land‐use change trajectories up to 2050: insights from a global agro‐economic model comparison (2014, background): “…a consistent land-use database developed by Krause et al. 105 (2009), which is based on Erb et al. (2007) and integrates crop suitability indicators (van Velthuizen et al., 2007), intact and frontier forest types (Bryant et al., 1997; Potapov et al., 2008), and protected areas (UNEP-WCMC, 2006).”
Aboveground carbon loss in natural and managed tropical forests from 2000 to 2012 (2015, methodology): “Instead, we defined tropical forest strata using remotely sensed-derived structural characteristics of tree canopy (year 2000 percent tree canopy cover (Hansen et al 2013)), tree height (current study) and forest intactness (Potapov et al 2008).”
Quantification of global gross forest cover loss (2010, background): “This simple model of forest clearing has led to the continual reduction of intact forests on every continent (26).”
High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change (2013, background): “The information content of the presented data sets, which are publicly available, provides a transparent, sound, and consistent basis on which to quantify critical environmental issues, including (i) the proximate causes of the mapped forest disturbances (15); (ii) the carbon stocks and associated e”