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The importance of capturing management in forest restoration targets

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1321–1325 (2023)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 01 September 2023

This article has been updated

Abstract

The restoration of tree cover has been placed at the top of international policy agendas, yet often, the ‘type’ of restored forests can be widely different, with consequences for biodiversity and livelihoods. Here we used a map of forest management types to assess the extent of managed forests in recent tree cover gains globally. We call on policymakers to differentiate forest management as a distinct element of reforestation targets.

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Fig. 1: Areas with forest gain globally and across three different remote-sensing datasets.
Fig. 2: Forest-cover gain occurs in areas of high conservation value and low- to medium-intensity food production.

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Data availability

All land-cover data are publicly available through Google Earth Engine (Code availability). The global FML has been released as part of a previous study10. The validation data created as part of this work are made available as a separate data file on a GitHub repository (https://github.com/Martin-Jung/FML_ForestGain) with the methods described in Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The Google Earth Engine script used to extract the information has been made available in Supplementary Information. All other scripts are made available on a GitHub repository (https://github.com/Martin-Jung/FML_ForestGain).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI). We thank M. Dürauer, I. Georgieva and M. Shchepashchenko for their assistance through Geo-Wiki.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Martin Jung & Eleanor Warren-Thomas

  2. Advancing Systems Analysis Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Myroslava Lesiv, Dmitry Shchepashchenko, Linda See & Steffen Fritz

  3. School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK

    Eleanor Warren-Thomas

  4. V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

    Dmitry Shchepashchenko

Authors
  1. Martin Jung
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  2. Myroslava Lesiv
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  4. Dmitry Shchepashchenko
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  5. Linda See
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  6. Steffen Fritz
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Contributions

M.J. conceived the idea, led the analysis and drafted the paper. M.L. contributed data and edited the paper. E.W.-T., D.S., L.S. and S.F. conceived the idea and contributed to the drafting of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Jung.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Sustainability thanks Matthew Fagan, Paula Meli and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Figures and Tables.

Reporting Summary

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1a

Source data for the timeline data in Fig. 1b.

Source Data Fig. 1b

Source data for the proportion data in Fig. 1c.

Source Data Fig. 2a

Source data for Fig. 2a.

Source Data Fig. 2b

Source data for Fig. 2b.

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Jung, M., Lesiv, M., Warren-Thomas, E. et al. The importance of capturing management in forest restoration targets. Nat Sustain 6, 1321–1325 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01192-8

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