| Objectives: | UNEP-WCMC has been gathering and compiling spatial data on the extent and conservation status of forests since 1987. Until 1995, WCMC's work focused on tropical moist forests because of their high species diversity. GIS data were first assembled for closed moist tropical forests and used to publish the three volumes of the Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests, covering Asia (1991), Africa (1992) and the Americas (1996). Because digital data were rare at this time, the process of assembling the forest cover data sets involved digitizing manually many paper maps. Continuing on from the tropical moist forest mapping, the next major initiative was to create the first 'World Forest Map'. This was produced in 1996 and was the first digital global forest map showing actual forest extent and protected areas with forested land. Since this achievement, significant work has been carried out to improve data sources and fill in gaps which occurred in this first attempt. This led to the production of the 'Global Overview of Forest Conservation CDROM' in 1997. UNEP-WCMC continues to map the global distribution of forests, and with more data becoming constantly available in digital format there is less manual digitizing in-house and more collaboration with other organizations to obtain and exchange forest data. The updating of UNEP-WCMC's forest data is a continuous process. The wide range of original data sources that produce the UNEP-WCMC forest dataset are compiled at many different scales, resolutions and accuracy's, and which use a multitude of classification methods. To accommodate such variation, forest data are re-classified or harmonized into UNEP-WCMC's standard classification scheme. |