Forest condition in the Congo Basin for the assessment of ecosystem conservation status

Abstract

Measuring forest degradation is important for understanding and designing measures to protect biodiversity and the capacity of forests to deliver ecosystem services. Conservation planning, particularly the prioritization of management interventions for forests, is often lacking spatial data on ecological condition, and it is often overlooked within decision-making processes. Existing methods for assessing forest degradation via proxies or binary measures (i.e. intact or not) cannot adequately consider the important variations of ecological condition. Direct methods to measure degradation (e.g. through remote sensing) require extensive training data, calibration and validation, and may be too sensitive to small-scale or short-term changes which may not be related to degradation. We developed a metric termed Forest Condition (FC) which aims to measure the degree of forest degradation, incorporating temporal history of forest change over a large spatial extent. We parameterized this metric based on estimated changes in above ground biomass in the context of forest fragmentation over time to estimate a continuous measure of forest degradation for Congo Basin countries. We estimate that just less than 70% of Congo Basin forests remain fully intact. FC was validated by direct remote sensing measurements from Landsat imagery for DRC. Results showed that FC was significantly positively correlated with forest canopy cover, gap area per hectare, and magnitude of temporal change in Normalized Burn Ratio. We tested the ability of FC to distinguish primary and secondary degradation and deforestation and found significant differences in gap area and spectral anomalies to validate our theoretical model. We used the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems criteria to demonstrate the value of applying forest degradation to assess the risk of ecosystem collapse. Based on this assessment, we found that without including FC in the assessment of biotic disruption, 12 ecosystems could not have a threat status assigned, and a further 9 ecosystems would have a lower threat status. Our overall assessment of ecosystems found approximately half of forest of Congo Basin ecosystem types which cover over 20% of all forest area are threatened including 4 ecosystems (<1% of total area) which are critically engendered. FC is a transferrable and scalable assessment to support forest monitoring, planning, and management.