• DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-19493-3
• Corpus ID: 228082162

Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

@article{Grantham2020AnthropogenicMO,
  title={Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40\% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity},
  author={Hedley S Grantham and Annie Duncan and Tom Evans and K R Jones and Hawthorne L. Beyer and Richard Schuster and Joseph Walston and Justina C. Ray and John G. Robinson and Martin Callow and Tom Clements and Hugo M. Costa and A. DeGemmis and Paul R. Elsen and Jamison Ervin and P Franco and Elizabeth Dow Goldman and Scott J. Goetz and Andrew J. Hansen and E. Hofsvang and Patrick Jantz and S Jupiter and Aili Kang and Penny F. Langhammer and William F. Laurance and Susan Lieberman and Matthew Linkie and Yadvinder S. Malhi and Sean L. Maxwell and Mart{\'i}n Mendez and Russell A. Mittermeier and Nicholas J. Murray and Hugh P. Possingham and Jeremy Radachowsky and Sassan S. Saatchi and Cristi{\'a}n Samper and J. Silverman and Aur{\'e}lie C. Shapiro and Bernardo B. N. Strassburg and Ted Stevens and Emma J. Stokes and R. Taylor and Timothy H. Tear and R Tizard and Oscar Venter and Piero Visconti and Shaobai Wang and James E. M. Watson},
  journal={Nature Communications},
  year={2020},
  volume={11}
}

• H. Grantham, A. Duncan, +45 authors J. Watson
• Published 1 December 2020
• Environmental Science
• Nature Communications

Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index of lost connectivity, we generate a globally consistent, continuous index of forest condition as determined by the degree of anthropogenic modification. Globally, only 17.4 million km2 of forest (40.5%) has high landscape-level integrity (mostly found in Canada, Russia, the Amazon, Central Africa, and New Guinea) and only 27% of this area is found in nationally designated protected areas. Of the forest inside protected areas, only 56% has high landscape-level integrity. Ambitious policies that prioritize the retention of forest integrity, especially in the most intact areas, are now urgently needed alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and restoring the integrity of forests globally.