Author Maginnis, S. & Jackson, W.

Year of publication 2005

Think of a tropical forest landscape and the image that probably springs to mind is of a billowing, continuous canopy with scattered solitary emergents, a sea with many shades of green and the occasional dramatic splash of colour stretching uninterrupted towards the horizon. Reality is often quite different. Deforestation and forest degradation have altered many of the world's tropical forest landscapes to such a degree that—according to a report by Bryant et al. (1997)—only 42% of remaining forest cover, or 18% of original forest cover, in the tropics is still found in large, contiguous tracts. The same report lists eight ITTO producer countries (and most ITTO consumer countries) in which virtually all the forest estate is in fragmented, modified blocks. This article shows figures behind this shift in the configuration of tropical lands which are dramatic. About 830 million hectares of tropical forest can be classified as fragmented (Bryant et al. 1997), although admittedly some of these forest fragments might be hundreds of square kilometres in size.