“Worldwide we have now destroyed over half of the forests that once flourished on our planet. Not only are we losing the animals that once lived in them we are also changing the climate of the entire globe. But our planet’s forests, if given the chance, are almost unbelievably resilient.” – David Attenborough, Our Planet II

Forests are one of the most important ecosystems on earth, supporting 80% of terrestrial biodiversity while covering 31% of terrestrial land ¹ (down from around 50% at the start of the 20th century, marking the most rapid decline in forest area in our history). Forests serve many vital roles, including supporting ecosystems for the pollinators that 75% of our agriculture relies on, stabilizing global weather patterns through atmospheric moisture regulation, and slowing climate change by absorbing 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually². While deforestation is not new, it peaked dramatically in the 1980’s and its environmental impact was felt worldwide through the resulting effects on local ecosystems and global weather patterns. Thanks to scientific research that has informed conservation and land-usage policies deforestation has slowed since then, but it is still occurring at higher rates than the forests are able to recover from.

Forests are not present in every country on earth, but their benefits stretch beyond boarders. However, policies aimed at protecting forests and regulating deforestation are most often nationally-dictated and enforced.³ Therefore I wanted to identify global forest density patterns to establish a baseline, as well as look at individual countries with the greatest positive and negative changes to help identify locations where successful policies are in place, or where more attention is needed. I looked at global forest density data set I found on Kaggle, which is attributed to Our World in Data – Deforestation⁴, to analyze forest density trends after peak deforestation in the 1980s. I chose this data so I could look at net changes in forest density rather than strictly at deforestation as including reforestation information can help highlight positive environmental trends as well as identify countries whose forestry practices we could look to when developing future environmental and land-usage strategies.

Global forest density between 1990 – 2020 is trending downwards

I started by visualizing the change in global forest density over time to establish an overall trend before looking at individual countries. This showed that despite decreased deforestation rates compared to 1980 the net forest area lost between 1990-2020 is still trending downwards at an unsustainable rate. 177,5 million hectares have been lost without recovery. I chose a line-graph to visualize the data trend over time, and used a red line that gets darker as the density decreases to indicate the downward trend.

In the most extreme cases, net forest area loss outpaces recovery

I looked at country-specific data in terms of total forest area changes and chose to highlight the top 10 extremes in both directions. These graphs have identical x-axis distributions to standardize the bar length, which helps show that deforestation rates exceed reforestation rates in terms of total area change. The axis for net area lost was flipped to to visualize the decreasing values in opposition to the increasing values of the net area gained graph. The colors are a continuation of the using red to indicate a negative value, and introducing green to indicate improvement.

Forests are able to recover

Forests come in many sizes, and looking only at hectares might cause us to overlook smaller countries who may be losing a greater proportion of their forest area. To normalize the data I looked what percent of a country’s forest area had changed. It is worth noting that these graphs each have a different x-axis: for area remaining the axis starts at 0% (indicating complete forest loss) ends at 100% (no change) while area recovered starts from 100% (no change) and stretches to just over 300%, with the successful reforestation and expansion of Mangrove forests in Bahrain.

Reflection

Most of the existing examples I found regarding forest data was presented using maps. However chose to I use a line graph to observe the global trend, and expanded on this information with bar graphs to make discrete value comparisons and highlight the 10 most extreme cases of forest loss and gain in each visualization group. Additionally, I chose horizontal bar graphs to ensure readability of the longer country names and aid in comparison between values within as wall as across graphs. Since I was just focusing on extreme values for the bar graphs I hope that the first line graph of global trends effectively established a reference point to relate the data back to. But for future iterations I would like to include a vertical line showing the averages for the Net Forest and Percent of Forest graphs to help contextualize the extremes in each group. I would also reformat the Lowest Percent of Forest Area Remaining to show the % loss rather than the % remaining to improve the data’s impact and its comparison against the % recovered.

It is also important to note that this data does not include historical or economic contexts of the countries shown. In expanded work I hope to be able to visualize that information alongside environmental data to capture a more holistic picture.

“Forests do have an astonishing ability to recover” – David Attenborough, Our Planet II

1. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/biodiversity/#:~:text=Why%20should%20we%20care?,other%20time%20in%20human%20history. ↩︎
2. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/biodiversity ↩︎
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802300136X#:~:text=In%20the%20last%20decades%2C%20all,2010%2C%20Sanford%2C%202021). ↩︎
4. (https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation ↩︎