Natural forests of the world 2020 - probability maps

Informed decisions to reduce deforestation, protect biodiversity, and curb carbon emissions require not just knowing where forests are, but understanding their composition. Identifying natural forests, which serve as critical biodiversity hotspots and major carbon sinks, is particularly valuable. We developed a novel global natural forest map for 2020 at 10 m resolution. This map can support initiatives like the European Union's Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and other forest monitoring or conservation efforts that require a comprehensive baseline for monitoring deforestation and degradation. The globally consistent map represents the probability of natural forest presence, enabling nuanced analysis and regional adaptation for decision-making.The dataset has a spatial resolution of 10 m. It is organized by UTM zones, with one zip file per UTM zone (60 zip files for the 60 longitudinal UTM zones). Each UTM zone contains multiple GEOTIFF files for all patches that contain land (usually up to 100 patches per UTM cell, where each UTM zone can contain up to 20 cells). The single band of each GEOTIFF file contains the probability of the pixel being natural forest in 2020, scaled by a factor of 250, and saved as uint8.