Abstract
Tropical forests harbour the highest biodiversity on the planet and are essential to human livelihoods and the global economy. However continued loss and degradation of forested landscapes, coupled with a rapidly rising global population, is placing incredible pressure on forests globally. The United Nations has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD +) programme in response to the challenges facing tropical forests and in recognition of the role they can play in climate mitigation. REDD + requires consistent and reliable monitoring of forests, however, national-level methodologies for measuring degradation are often bespoke and, because of an inability to track degradation effectively, the majority of countries combine reporting for deforestation and forest degradation into a single value. Here, we extend a recent analysis that enabled the detection of selective logging at the scale of a logging concession to a regional-scale estimation of selective logging activities. We utilized logging records from across Brazil to train a supervised classification algorithm for detecting logged pixels in Landsat imagery then predicted the extent of logging over a 20 year period throughout Rondônia, Brazil. Approximately one-quarter of the forested lands in Rondônia were cleared between 2000 and 2019. We estimate that 11.0% of the forest area present in 2000 had been selectively logged by 2019, comprising >11 500 km2 of forest. In general, rates of selective logging were twice as high in the first decade relative to the last decade of the period. Our approach is a considerable advance in developing an operationalized selective logging monitoring system capable of detecting subtle forest disturbances over large spatial scales.
Highlights
The ten countries reporting the highest forest losses over the last 15 years are all in the tropics (FAO 2015)
The United Nations has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD +) programme in response to the challenges facing tropical forests and in recognition of the role they can play in climate mitigation
The IPCC and REDD + lack specific methodological details on quantifying emissions from forest degradation (IPCC 2006, Pearson et al 2014). This is because degradation is notoriously difficult to quantify, as it includes a variety of forest disturbances, and forest degradation often operates at spatial and temporal scales incompatible with reporting at the national level (Hosonuma et al 2012, Pearson et al 2014, Ghazoul et al 2015)
Summary
The ten countries reporting the highest forest losses over the last 15 years are all in the tropics (FAO 2015). Continued loss and degradation of tropical forests, coupled with a rising global population and growing energy demands, are putting enormous pressure on forests globally (Edwards et al 2019). In response to both the challenges and opportunities tropical forests present, the United Nations (UN) has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD +) programme. The IPCC and REDD + lack specific methodological details on quantifying emissions from forest degradation (IPCC 2006, Pearson et al 2014). National-level methodologies for measuring degradation are often bespoke and most countries report emissions from both forest degradation and deforestation as a single, combined value (Hosonuma et al 2012, Pearson et al 2017)
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