Deforestation, especially in the tropics, is the leading driver of biodiversity loss worldwide, contributing to climate change as well as to the widespread degradation of nature’s contributions to people (Díaz et al., 2019). Advances in satellite imagery and processing capabilities have enabled major progress in identifying deforestation at increasingly high spatial and temporal resolution, with rapid response time, and across the globe.
Frontier metrics (Baumann et al., 2022; Buchadas et al., 2022) have recently been developed to capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of forest loss, and have been demonstrated to characterize advancing and emerging frontiers over a period of 40 years for the South American Dry Chaco (Baumann et al. 2022) and for the world’s tropical dry woodlands globally over a 20-year period (Buchadas et al. 2020). Drawing on a more detailed analysis of time series of forest loss, frontier metrics are calculated through the aggregation of spatial data into larger units that function as small landscapes composed of individual cells:
Built upon the frameworks proposed by Buchadas et al. (2022) and Baumann
et al. (2022), the R package frontiermetrics enables the calculation
of frontier metrics at any geographical extent.
You can install the R package from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("phuais/frontiermetrics", build_vignettes = TRUE)Once installed, explore the introductory vignette:
vignette(topic = "intro", package = "frontiermetrics")Baumann, M., Gasparri, I., Buchadas, A., Oeser, J., Meyfroidt, P., Levers, C., … & Kuemmerle, T. (2022). Frontier metrics for a process-based understanding of deforestation dynamics. Environmental Research Letters, 17(9), 095010.
Buchadas, A., Baumann, M., Meyfroidt, P., & Kuemmerle, T. (2022). Uncovering major types of deforestation frontiers across the world’s tropical dry woodlands. Nature Sustainability, 5(7), 619-627.
Díaz, S., Settele, J., Brondízio, E. S., Ngo, H. T., Agard, J., Arneth, A., … & Zayas, C. N. (2019). Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change. Science, 366(6471), eaax3100.
Hansen, M. C., Potapov, P. V., Moore, R., Hancher, M., Turubanova, S. A., Tyukavina, A., … & Townshend, J. R. (2013). High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. science, 342(6160), 850-853.