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June 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: A river to ruin Feature: Brothers in biology Feature: Scar sands Feature: Simply Superior The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

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Last stands
As the world population increases, frontier forests are succumbing to the relentless march of human activity
By Steven Fick and Elizabeth Shilts

It stands to reason that all the Earth’s frontier forests — the large, intact swaths of natural and relatively undisturbed forest ecosystems — could not last forever. After all, we humans have been multiplying rapidly, having doubled our numbers since 1950 alone. And more people means more demand for agricultural land, timber and fuelwood. But when you see just how much of that high-quality forest we have chipped away over the past eight millennia (above), it also stands to reason that we might want to hold on to what’s left.

Few countries still have significant tracts of frontier forest. Asia has lost 95 percent, Africa has only patches left in the Congo Basin, and Scandinavia holds Europe’s last stands. And three-quarters of what remains is confined to three large areas: Russia’s boreal forest; the band of boreal that runs across Alaska and Canada; and the rain forest of the Amazon Basin and Guyana Shield of South America.

A frontier forest is not necessarily devoid of people — it can be home to small human populations or undergo sustainable logging practices — but to be considered “frontier,” it must be able to support its natural biodiversity. For Canada’s boreal forests, for example, that means healthy and viable populations of species such as grizzly bears and woodland caribou.

Only about 10 percent of Canada’s northern forests are protected, and with growing interest in the potential energy reserves buried under them, along with the mining, logging and, in some places, agricultural demands on them, much more needs to be protected to ensure the maintenance of this globally treasured ecosystem.

“There is a huge opportunity in Canada,” says Matt Carlson, science adviser for the Canadian Boreal Initiative, an Ottawa-based conservation group, “to conduct proactive land-use planning to protect the boreal forest so that we don’t run into problems faced in the rest of the world, where you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”

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