Forests - Current

UNEP-WCMC has been gathering and compiling spatial data on the extent and conservation status of forests since 1987. Until 1995, WCMC's work focused on tropical moist forests because of their high species diversity. GIS data were first assembled for closed moist tropical forests and used to publish the three volumes of the Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests, covering Asia (1991), Africa (1992) and the Americas (1996). Because digital data were rare at this time, the process of assembling the forest cover data sets involved digitising manually many paper maps.