What Is Threatening Forests in Protected Areas? A Global Assessment of Deforestation in Protected Areas, 2001–2018

Abstract

The protection of forests is crucial to providing important ecosystem services, such as supplying clean air and water, safeguarding critical habitats for biodiversity, and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this importance, global forest loss has steadily increased in recent decades. Protected Areas (PAs) currently account for almost 15% of Earth’s terrestrial surface and protect 5% of global tree cover and were developed as a principal approach to limit the impact of anthropogenic activities on natural, intact ecosystems and habitats. We assess global trends in forest loss inside and outside of PAs, and land cover following this forest loss, using a global map of tree cover loss and global maps of land cover. While forests in PAs experience loss at lower rates than non-protected forests, we find that the temporal trend of forest loss in PAs is markedly similar to that of all forest loss globally. We find that forest loss in PAs is most commonly—and increasingly—followed by shrubland, a broad category that could represent re-growing forest, agricultural fallows, or pasture lands in some regional contexts. Anthropogenic forest loss for agriculture is common in some regions, particularly in the global tropics, while wildfires, pests, and storm blowdown are a significant and consistent cause of forest loss in more northern latitudes, such as the United States, Canada, and Russia. Our study describes a process for screening tree cover loss and agriculture expansion taking place within PAs, and identification of priority targets for further site-specific assessments of threats to PAs. We illustrate an approach for more detailed assessment of forest loss in four case study PAs in Brazil, Indonesia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the United States.

Rapidly Accelerating Deforestation in Cambodia’s Mekong River Basin: A Comparative Analysis of Spatial Patterns and Drivers

“…Our findings suggest that protected areas had lower rates of forest loss than non-protected areas; however, cumulative forest loss in protected areas still approached 20%, suggesting that protected area enforcement continues to be a major problem. Globally, Wade et al [28] estimated that between 2001 and 2019 there was an annual loss of approximately 0.2% per year of forest area within protected areas worldwide. In contrast, we estimate a forest-loss rate of 0.5% per year within protected areas from 1993 to 2017.…”

“…In contrast, we estimate a forest-loss rate of 0.5% per year within protected areas from 1993 to 2017. Wade et al [28] found Cambodia and Côte d'Ivoire to be the two tropical countries with the highest rate of forest loss within protected areas in the world. In our study, the largest forest losses from protected areas occurred in 2004 and 2010.…”

Long-Time Interval Satellite Image Analysis on Forest-Cover Changes and Disturbances around Protected Area, Zeya State Nature Reserve, in the Russian Far East

“…Therefore, knowing how forest covers change over time inside and outside protected areas, especially in inaccessible locations, can improve forest conservation and management [9,55,57]. Information on forest fires, timber harvesting, and other anthropogenic activities around reserves, along with the help of remote-sensing techniques, can support park protection [9,[58][59][60].…”

Metrics based on information entropy applied to evaluate complexity of landscape patterns

“…Therefore, these are areas of high environmental stress and represent possible threats to the resilience of the landscape, as they can affect the self-organisation of the system. Anthropogenic activities related to the removal of natural vegetation, as well as extensive and intensive land use conversion [ 11 – 14 ], are responsible for the increase in landscape fragmentation and expansion of their transition zones. Habitat fragmentation is a major threat to landscape connectivity [ 15 ] and contributes a large human footprint in the Anthropocene, especially in tropical forests [ 16 ].…”