Climate change and human activities strongly influence forests, but uncertainties persist about the pervasiveness of these stressors and how they will shape future forest structure. Disentangling the relative influences of climate and human activities on global forest structure is essential for understanding and predicting the role of forests in biosphere carbon cycling and biodiversity conservation as well as for climate mitigation strategies. Using a synthetic forest canopy structure index, we map forest structural density at a near-global scale using a satellite dataset.
Li, W., Guo, WY., Pasgaard, M. et al. Human fingerprint on structural density of forests globally. Nat Sustain 6, 368–379 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01020-5 via @JCSvenning