Mapping the world’s intact forest landscapes by remote sensing

Protection of large natural forest landscapes is a highly important task to help fulfill different international strategic initiatives to protect forest biodiversity, to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to stimulate sustainable forest management practices. This paper introduces a new approach for mapping large intact forest landscapes (IFL), defined as an unbroken expanse of natural ecosystems within areas of current forest extent, without signs of significant human activity, and having an area of at least 500 km2. A global IFL map was created using..