Global planted forest data for timber species

Abstract

Discerning whether certain timber species were harvested from natural forests versus often less restricted planted forests can help ascertain the legality of wood products that enter the global market. However, readily available global planted forest data to the species level have been scarce. We confronted the need for such data by developing a two-pronged dataset, consisting of 'polygon' and 'non-polygon' location-based data, collectively, Planted Forest Timber Data. We obtained the polygon data from the World Resources Institute's Spatial Database of Planted Trees v2.0, extracting data specific to traded timber species. We derived the non-polygon data from peer-reviewed literature and government documents. The polygon dataset encompasses 27 countries and 253 species and the non-polygon dataset spans 91 countries and 447 species. We envision that the more these two living datasets grow, the more they will mutually benefit from one another for data cross-validation. This assembled information is meant to equip global leaders in forest governance, policy, enforcement, and research with vetted data for promoting legal timber trade and protecting biodiversity.

Fig. 1

Data assembly workflow. The ‘Sources’ were used to generate the ‘Initial Datasets’ which underwent ‘Curation’ to produce the ‘Final Datasets’. The final datasets consisted of the (A) polygon dataset and (B) non-polygon dataset (right panel).

Fig. 2

Number of unique species planted by country. Both polygon and non-polygon data are represented together. Darker green color indicates a higher number of unique species in the given country.