The latest in mapping the world’s intact forests
In the latest issue of Ecology and Society, Peter Potapov et al’s
article Mapping the world’s intact forest landscapes by remote
sensing. (Ecology and Society 13(2): 51). Shows a new map of global
forests – showing the “intact forest” areas that are not directly
transformed by human action.
Compared to other global forest areas
assessments the authors found: 1) significantly less intact area in
boreal forests than the World’s Wilderness Areas analysis (McCloskey
and Spalding 1989) and the Frontier Forests analysis (Bryant et al.
1997) because of our more recent data allowing us to capture the
effect of the expansion of oil and gas extraction infrastructure in
Canada and Siberia, as well as the role of extensive human-caused
fires accompanying industrial development of northern forests. 2) more
intact areas in dense tropical forests (the Amazon and Congo basins)
and in boreal mountains (southern and eastern Siberia, Kamchatka,
Alaska, and the Canadian Rocky Mountains) than was found in previous
studies based on coarse-scale map and expert data analysis. 3) the
Human Footprint data set (Sanderson et al. 2002), which finds a
significantly larger area to be intact within boreal regions and the
southern part of the Amazon Basin in Brazil. Both areas were developed
(by industrial logging and oil and gas extraction in Canada and
Russia, and by agricultural clearing in Brazil) in recent decades, and
these changes were not captured in the Human Footprint assessment. 4)
in some regions (i.e., Central Africa, boreal forests in Siberia and
Canada) we found a smaller area to be intact than the Human Footprint
map because we classified burned areas in the vicinity of
infrastructure as not intact. 5) The Landscape Domestication Analysis
by The Nature Conservancy, which relied on existing transportation
network maps, also overestimated the intact area (Kareiva et al.
2007). http://rs.resalliance.org/2008/12/16/mapping-the-worlds-intact-forests/
Posted via email from Deane’s posterous