Canada Now World Leader In Degradation Of Large, Pristine Forests
The world's precious few remaining large forests are fragmenting at an alarming rate, and the degradation in Canada leads the world, a new analysis shows.
The degradation of such pristine "intact" forests threatens species such as Canada's woodland caribou and Asia's tigers that rely on huge unbroken expanses of natural ecosystems in order to survive, said Nigel Sizer, global director of forest programs with the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research institute focused on resource sustainability.
This week, the group, along with its collaborators, released a new global map of intact forest landscapes, along with an analysis of how those landscapes have changed since the year 2000. The maps are available as part of the institute's Global Forest Watch online forest monitoring and alert system.
The satellite mapping analysis led by Peter Potapov, an associate professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland, showed that over 104 million hectares of the world's remaining intact forests — an area about the size of Ontario — were degraded between 2000 to 2013. Such forests are considered degraded when they are broken up or fragmented into smaller pieces that are no longer the same kind of ecosystem. Sizer called the amount of degradation a "shocking number." "What is lost is the intactness… This is a process which results in biodiversity loss — particularly, far-ranging species will no longer be able to survive," said Christoph Thies, senior forest campaigner for Greenpeace International, which contributed to the research through its Greenpeace GIS (geographic information systems) Laboratory.
EDIT
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canada-s-degradation-of-pristine-intact-forests-leads-world-1.2757138?cmp=rss
= new reply since forum marked as read
We are lagging far behind the USA in lowering life expectancy, infant mortality and educational levels, so it's nice to know we're forging ahead in this area at least... 
