The conservation burden of Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs): A global database of management units and IFLs

Introduction

This dataset includes a global overview of publicly available forest Management Units (MUs), Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) and their overlap. This includes both the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and the tropical forests in the Amazon, the Congo basin, South-East Asia. The dataset was developed for the paper "Feasibility and effectiveness of global Intact Forest Landscape protection through forest certification: The conservation burden of Intact Forest Landscapes" by Zwerts et al. (2024). A comprehensive list of MUs with % and absolute overlap with IFLs is presented in Table S1 of Zwerts et al. (2024).

Data collection

We collected and collated all publicly available MU and IFL data of Central Africa, Southeast Asia, the Amazon, and of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. As such, we included MU data from Cameroon, Canada, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Republic of Congo and Russia. Together, these forests comprise the majority of all IFLs (Potapov et al., 2017). We utilized the 2020 intact forest landscape (IFL) dataset generated by Potapov et al. (2017). Both FSC-certified and non-FSC MUs were considered and FSC-certification status data was collected using the FSC public dashboard (FSC, 2023). All data was collected in March 2023. Our dataset is not exhaustive. To our knowledge, not all MU data is publicly available. For Southeast Asia no public MU data is available for Papua New Guinea and Peninsular Malaysia. For the Amazon, insufficient public MU data was available to create an accurate representation of the situation. This area was excluded from the main analysis in Zwerts et al., 2024. We included a distinction between FSC-certified and non-FSC MUs in Russia, even though the FSC has withdrawn all certificates in Russia in April 2023 following the invasion of Ukraine. We chose to retain the distinction between FSC and non-FSC MUs for the Russian data because of the uncertainty of the current situation and the significant influence of FSC-certification in the Russian management of IFLs.

Overlap analysis

All area was transformed to geodesic distance. Furthermore, several MU names were altered because of duplicate names. The number of hectares of MUs that overlap with IFLs was calculated in ArcGIS Pro 3.0.0, using the WGS_1984_Web_Mercator_Auxiliary_Sphere coordinate system. Using the intersect and multipart to singlepart tools every overlap fragment was isolated. For the results in Zwerts et al. (2024) the total overlap and the percentage of overlap was calculated in R. 

Abstract of the related article

Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) are defined as forested areas of at least 500 km2 that show no signs of remotely sensed human activity. They are considered to be of high conservation value due to their role in maintaining biodiversity and mitigating climate change. In 2014, the members of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the major global certification schemes for responsible forest management, took a conservation stand by restricting logging in FSC-certified IFLs. However, this move raised concerns about the economic viability of FSC-certified logging in these areas. To address these challenges, in 2022, FSC proposed an integrated landscape approach, considering local conditions and stakeholders' needs to balance IFL protection, economic sustainability, and community interests. Here, we leverage publicly available management unit (MU) data, to provide a global quantitative overview of IFLs designated for timber production. We use the concept of 'conservation burden' for the extent that MUs overlap with IFLs, representing the impact that IFL protection has on forest management operations if logging is disallowed. Our data indicates that currently FSC-certified MUs affect 0.6% of global IFLs. Too restrictive policies for logging in IFLs may discourage FSC-certification in global IFLs. Considering the environmental and social benefits of FSC certification, it warrants careful examination whether the benefits of protecting a limited subset of FSC-certified IFLs outweighs the cost of potentially reduced growth of the total FSC-certified area. Our data can provide a basis to facilitate stakeholder engagement for landscape-level IFL management.