Lars Laestadius

Mapping the World's Intact Forest Landscapes by Remote Sensing

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 worlds 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).

When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.

Sparing grasslands: map misinterpreted.

J. W. Veldman et al. argue that the worlds ancient (old-growth) grasslands should be spared from restoration-motivated tree planting (“Tyranny of trees in grassy biomes,” Letters, 30 January, p. [484][1]). We strongly agree. However, they also claim that the global Atlas of Forest Landscape

The Global Restoration Initiative

Abstract A global analysis indicates that more than 2 billion ha of cleared and degraded forest lands—an area twice the size of China—are not in productive agriculture or human habitation. Restoring these lands represents an immense opportunity to improve food security, human livelihoods, water supplies, climate stability, and natural resource management demonstrated through successful examples of restoration in Niger, Nepal, Brazil, India, and Ethiopia. However, challenges remain. It is essential to assess the motivation for restoration, the enabling conditions, and the factors that make implementation possible. Before rushing into restoration decisions, it is important to recognize that returning a landscape to its former ecosystem may not be possible (or even desirable) in some places. In order to create resilient landscapes for the 21st century, we need to simultaneously restore forests and increase the productivity of existing agricultural lands, which support human livelihoods and well-being.