In collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), UNEP-WCMC compiled The World Forest Map - the first digital global forest map showing actual forest extent and protected areas with forested land. The digital map is maintained and updated at UNEP-WCMC for use in promoting forest conservation. It was used to produce a poster, made widely available to people in the conservation and environmental community. The global Geographic Information System (GIS) data which contributed to the poster map are based on more detailed maps and digital files from national and international sources compiled mainly between the early 1980s and early 1990s. The digital information was used to estimate the amount of each major forest type in the world under protection and provide a baseline for future monitoring of forests.

Background

UNEP-WCMC has been gathering and compiling spatial data on the extent and conservation status of forests since 1987. Until 1995, because of their high species diversity, UNEP-WCMC focused on the moist tropics. However, with the completion of the first pan-tropical moist forest coverage, attention was turned to temperate and boreal forests, while at the same time maintaining the tropical moist forest datasets.

WWF asked UNEP-WCMC to compile the world forest map to provide forest information for their Forests for Life Campaign. The two targets of the campaign:

• Target 1, Protected Areas. To establish an ecologically representative network of protected areas, covering at least 10% of the world's forest area by the year 2000
  
  
• Target 2, Independent Certification. To ensure the independent certification of 10 million hectares of sustainably managed forest by 1998

Forest Types

It was not possible to map all forest types at the global scale, so the following five groups were used: Temperate Needleleaf Forests, Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests, Tropical Moist Forests, Tropical Dry Forests and Mangroves.

Adopting a simple, global classification inevitably led to some arbitrary divisions being made. In particular there is no clear dividing line between temperate and tropical; many montane tropical areas have temperate climates. It was also not possible to be completely consistent, e.g., areas of open coniferous forest in the transition zone between Taiga and Tundra were included as forests whereas open dry woodland in the tropics was not mapped, even though it may have a greater canopy cover. Consistency has been maintained within each of the five categories.

Protected Areas

To determine the extent to which the world's forests are currently protected, all protected areas in IUCN Management Categories I - V greater than 1,000 hectares in extent (for which locality data are available and which cover entirely or in part the forest areas) were shown on the map.

GAP Analysis

By overlaying protected areas onto forests it was possible, using GIS, to analyse the proportion of forest area under protection for each of the five forest types. This analysis helps to show how ecologically representative the global network of protected areas is, and therefore, to help direct WWF's activities under Target 1 of the Forests for Life campaign.

The World Forest Map was the first attempt made by UNEP-WCMC to bring together complex forest datasets from numerous sources, to present a comprehensive picture of the extent and protection of the world's forest. The intention is to compile later versions as updated or more accurate information on forest cover and protected areas becomes available. A brief set of sources has been published with the poster map to show which datasets were used in its compilation. The poster was published in June 1996.