Most forests have no protection.

• Author: Sugal, Cheri

A map of the world's forests, ten years in the making, has been produced by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Bringing together more detailed maps and digital files from over 80 sources, the new map shows that 94 percent of the planet's forest cover has no official protection from the expanding pressures of human activity - pressures which are now reducing that cover by 1 percent per year. A section of the map appears on the back cover of this issue.

The World Forest Map's main purpose is to highlight WWF's Forest for Life Campaign to increase the amount of forested land placed under some form of protection - hopefully to a minimum of 10 percent by the year 2000. The map shows not only that the area currently protected is dangerously small, but that the area of land covered by any forest - roughly one-third the earth's surface (compared to the one-half once covered) - is smaller than many people may have thought. About as much of the planet's surface is now covered by desert as by forest.

The WWF map classifies the planet's forests into five broad categories. The most predominant type is "needleleaf temperate," mainly the great boreal (coniferous) forests of Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, and Alaska, which cover a total of 1.4 billion hectares - about 13 percent of the planet's land surface. "Tropical moist" forests, including the Amazon, central Africa, and Indonesia, cover 1.1 billion hectares, or 10 percent of the land. Smaller areas are covered by "temperate broadleaf and mixed" forests (720 million hectares, or 7 percent), "tropical dry" forests (80 million hectares, or 1 percent), and the severely threatened coastal mangroves (20 million hectares, or 0.2 percent). The mangroves constitute only a small fraction of what once existed in many places - including just 13 percent of their original coverage in Thailand and 15 percent in India.

More detailed maps which were used to compile the World Forest Map, can be accessed on the World Wide Web, and they offer some surprises. The temperate forests, for example, turn out to have less official protection worldwide (about 5 percent) than the tropical moist ones (8 percent) - an ironic finding, in view of the attention focused on tropical rainforests by environmentalists in northern countries where the forests are mostly of the temperate variety.

The map highlights some shortcomings of available data, notes Dominick A. DellaSala, Forest Conservation...