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High-ResMaps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change

November 15, 2013 Wendy Purnell
Map of current forest cover (green) and forest loss (red) and gain (blue) between 2000-2012.

Map of current forest cover (green) and forest loss (red) and gain (blue) between 2000-2012.

Scientists at the University of Maryland, using Landsat data from 2000-2012, have generated an interactive map of global forest cover. Their results were published today in Science. While the team calculated a net loss of 579,000 square miles (1.5 million km2), WIRED Science highlights some of the good news:

The scientists found that Brazil’s efforts to battle forest loss are working. The country had the steepest decline in the annual rate of deforestation since 2000, cutting it in half to under 8,000 square miles per year.

It would be interesting to create overlays showing economic data and land use policy for the same time period to see if we can surmise (as in the case of Brazil) what works where. As Vice reporter Derek Mead points out, the rate of global deforestation is "not a particularly helpful statistic. If you want to combat the decline, you have to know why forests are disappearing in the first place, when means figuring out where they've disappeared—as well as where they've come back."

"Of four forest zones—tropical, subtropical, temperate, and boreal," the Vice piece continues, "the researchers only found one type of climate that exhibited a global trend: tropical forests, with losses increasing by a total of 2101 square kilometers a year." Below, we take a look at the most impoverished country in Central America, where decades of political instability combined with deforestation and climate change have put communities and fragile ecosystems at risk.  Nicaragua is home not merely to tropical forests, but to increasingly rare tropical dry forest, making it especially important in terms of biodiversity preservation

Zooming in on Nicaragua, we see a national deforestation trend. Here, in the second poorest country in the hemisphere, deforestation can be attributed to the usual drivers: consumption of firewood, timber products, rapid development, and traditional agricultural practices.

Among those responsible for Nicaragua's reforestation (the blue areas on the map below) are my friends at Paso Pacífico.

PasodelIstmoForestGain.png
aug2013_manandnaturemap_380x283.jpg

Working in the Rivas province, in the Paso del Istmo between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, Paso Pacífico collaborates with landowners and subsistence farmers eager to help protect biodiversity and improve natural resource management. Read more about their current reforestation and agroforestry work with French NGO Man and Nature.

I'm excited about the convergence of global studies across disciplines, especially as we learn to use technology and design to communicate information. University of Maryland's Global Forest Change Map App is available here.

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