Tropical Moist Forests

Tropical moist forests have a huge environmental value. They play an important role in biodiversity conservation, the terrestrial carbon cycle, hydrological regimes, indigenous population subsistence, and human health (1-5), and are increasingly recognized as an essential element of any strategy to mitigate climate change. Deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation compromise the functioning of tropical forests as an ecosystem, leading to biodiversity loss, reduced carbon storage capacity, and an increased risk of viral disease outbreaks. Accurate characterization of changes in tropical moist forests is therefore needed to support conservation policies and to better quantify their contribution to global carbon fluxes.

This dataset comprises the following map layers:

• Undisturbed tropical moist forest: Shows the coverage of undisturbed tropical moist forests remaining at the end of the year 2019.
• Deforestation year map: Shows where deforestation occurred over three decades (between 1982 and 2020) and indicates the year when the forest cover was deforested for the first time (followed or not by regrowth).
• Degradation year map: Shows where degradation occurred over three decades (between 1982 and 2020) and indicates the year when the forest was degraded for the first time (and remained degraded up to 2020).
• Transition map: Captures the dynamics of changes in tropical moist forests between the initial observation period (1990) and the end of the year 2020.

Source: European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) - Tropical Moist Forests (TMF)