A new study published in Nature Communications has found that 17.31% of tropical tree cover—an area spanning 395.9 million hectares (Mha)—has been consistently overlooked by global forest monitoring systems, exposing significant gaps in efforts to track deforestation and ecological degradation.
Using high-resolution satellite imagery (under 5 meters) and an advanced automated algorithm, an international research team mapped previously undetected tree cover (PUTC) across pan-tropical regions from 2015 to 2022. Their analysis revealed a net loss of 61.05 Mha in tropical tree cover during the period, with declines occurring not only in traditional forest areas (63.93%) but also in non-forested landscapes such as farmlands, grasslands, and urban zones (36.07%).
Regions with high concentrations of PUTC—where trees grow outside conventional forest boundaries—saw the most dramatic changes, highlighting limitations in widely used 10-meter resolution datasets like World Cover, the researchers noted.
