Losing a jewel-Rapid declines in Myanmar's intact forests from 2002-2014

Abstract

New and rapid political and economic changes in Myanmar are increasing the pressures on the country's forests. Yet, little is known about the past and current condition of these forests and how fast they are declining. We mapped forest cover in Myanmar through a consortium of international organizations and environmental non-governmental groups, using freely-available public domain data and open source software tools. We used Landsat satellite imagery to assess the condition and spatial distribution of Myanmar's intact and degraded forests with special focus on changes in intact forest between 2002 and 2014. We found that forests cover 42,365,729 ha or 63% of Myanmar, making it one of the most forested countries in the region. However, severe logging, expanding plantations, and degradation pose increasing threats. Only 38% of the country's forests can be considered intact with canopy cover >80%. Between 2002 and 2014, intact forests declined at a rate of 0.94% annually, totaling more than 2 million ha forest loss. Losses can be extremely high locally and we identified 9 townships as forest conversion hotspots. We also delineated 13 large (>100,000 ha) and contiguous intact forest landscapes, which are dispersed across Myanmar. The Northern Forest Complex supports four of these landscapes, totaling over 6.1 million ha of intact forest, followed by the Southern Forest Complex with three landscapes, comprising 1.5 million ha. These remaining contiguous forest landscape should have high priority for protection. Our project demonstrates how open source data and software can be used to develop and share critical information on forests when such data are not readily available elsewhere. We provide all data, code, and outputs freely via the internet at (for scripts: https://bitbucket.org/rsbiodiv/; for the data: http://geonode.themimu.info/layers/geonode%3Amyan_lvl2_smoothed_dec2015_resamp).

Fig 1. Distribution of forest cover and forest cover change across Myanmar.

(A) Countrywide forest cover and change; (B) Forest losses from mining along the Uru River in Kachin and Sagaing; (C) Plantation development near Myitkyina, Sagaing; (D) Plantation development near Mawdaung, Tanintharyi.

Fig 2. Remaining and lost intact forest (ha) for Myanmar townships between 2002 and 2014.

Fig 3. Remaining large and intact forest landscapes in Myanmar 2014.

Fig 4. Boxplot comparing mean canopy cover as measured by Hansen et al. (2013) for intact and degraded forests in different forest regions of Myanmar between 2002 and 2014.

Northern Sagaing = mostly mixed deciduous and evergreen forest; Southern Sagaing = mixed deciduous and dry dipterocarp forest; Tanintharyi = tropical evergreen forest. (A) Canopy cover values for intact forest; (B) Canopy Cover values for degraded forest; (C) Location of Landsat tiles used for comparison.