Scientists have a better understanding of the number of stars and galaxies in the universe than the number of species currently on earth. A little more than 1.7 million species have been described by science and estimates of the total number of species on earth vary wildly between 3 and 100 million. Yet each year this staggering amount of diversity takes a hit.  Research suggests that Earth is currently experiencing its sixth mass extinction. (The last extinction took out the dinosaurs 66 million […]

Sophie Gogibedashvili decided she wanted to be a forester during a hike in her second year of university. In the middle of Georgia’s Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park she was overwhelmed with emotion. “The forest was talking to me,” Sophie recalls. She is still touched by the memory even now, in her office at Georgia’s Center for […]

Many of us think of forests as pristine wilderness, minimally disturbed by humans. But today’s forests are far more complex. New data available on Global Forest Watch (GFW) enables us to understand another dimension of modern forests — trees planted and managed by humans. Though far from pristine natural forests, planted trees play many critical […]

The air is filled with the distinctive smell of burned wood in the tiny village of Sabue, tucked away in the crescent of the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. Misho Keinoshvili and his father chop wood for the wood burner to heat their house, while the sound of running water from the outside sink murmurs […]

By Sofia Soto Reyes Western Lowland Gorilla (in captivity). Source: Heather Paul (Flickr). License available here. Located in western equatorial Africa is a vast expanse of green that blankets six Congo Basin countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo. Second only to the Amazon rainforest […]

By James Anderson and Mikaela Weisse As Rio’s Olympic stadiums empty and athletes head home, Brazil’s big moment in the global spotlight seems to be drawing to a close. But if we take the opening ceremony’s commentary on forest restoration and climate change to heart, Brazil is more relevant than ever. Brazil’s forests, from the […]

By Wynet Smith and Ryan Cheng Find out more about Global Forest Watch Canada’s IFL data methodology here. Grizzly cubs along the Atnarko River, Tweedsmuir South Provincial Park, British Columbia. Photo by Mick Thompson (license information here). Deep in the pristine forests of Canada, far from the reach of human activity, endangered grizzlies and boreal […]

In the previous MAAP #25 and MAAP #26, we illustrated deforestation hotspots in the Peruvian Amazon for the periods 2012-2014 and 2015*, respectively. Here in MAAP #32, we present a complementary analysis based on the size of deforestation events. Graph 32a shows the comparative results of deforestation patterns between 2013 and 2015, indicating that: Small-scale (< 5 hectares) accounted for the vast majority of […]

By Liz Cole Białowieża Forest in Belarus. Source: Marc Veraart (Flickr). One of the world’s oldest and largest primeval forests is under threat due to recent approval of industrial logging in Poland. Spanning the border of Poland and Belarus, the Białowieża Forest is the last of the lowland forests, which covered all of Europe following […]