Peter Potapov

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Geographical Sciences

Spatially explicit information on crop distribution is essential for market information, food security, and agricultural sustainability. However, high-resolution crop maps are unavailable for most countries of the world. In this study, we developed an operational workflow and produced the first openly-available 10-m resolution maize and soybean map...

Agricultural intensification and forest conservation are often seen as incompatible. Agricultural interventions can help boost food security for poor rural communities but in certain cases can exacerbate deforestation, known as the rebound effect. We tested whether coupling agricultural interventions with participatory forest zoning could improve f...

The conversion of natural land cover into human-dominated land use systems has significant impacts on the environment. Global mapping and monitoring of human-dominated land use extent via satellites provides an empirical basis for assessing land use pressures. Here, we present a novel 2019 global land cover, land use, and ecozone map derived from L...

Biodiversity hotspots are conservation priority areas that feature exceptionally high levels of species endemism and high levels of habitat loss. The Guinean Forests of West Africa hotspot, home to a quarter of all the mammal species of Africa, has experienced high levels of forest loss within its protected areas. Here, we analyzed tree cover loss...

Across South America, the expansion of commodity land uses has underpinned substantial economic development at the expense of natural land cover and associated ecosystem services. Here, we show that such human impact on the continent’s land surface, specifically land use conversion and natural land cover modification, expanded by 268 million hectar...

Managing forests for climate change mitigation requires action by diverse stakeholders undertaking different activities with overlapping objectives and spatial impacts. To date, several forest carbon monitoring systems have been developed for different regions using various data, methods and assumptions, making it difficult to evaluate mitigation p...

Consistent, large-scale operational monitoring of forest height is essential for estimating forest-related carbon emissions, analyzing forest degradation, and quantifying the effectiveness of forest restoration initiatives. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar instrument onboard the International Space Station has been collectin...

European Russia rapidly transitioned after the collapse of the Soviet Union from state socialism to a market economy. How did this political and economic transformation interact with ecological conditions to determine forest loss and gain? We explore this question with a study of European Russia in the two decades following the collapse of the Sovi...

Tropical forest fragmentation results in habitat and biodiversity loss and increased carbon emissions. Here, we link an increased likelihood of tropical forest loss to decreasing fragment size, particularly in primary forests. The relationship holds for protected areas, albeit with half the rate of loss compared with all fragments. The fact that di...

Spatially and temporally consistent tree height time-series have great potential to improve the capacity for regional to country scales land cover monitoring. Here we present a method for mapping and monitoring tree height at a regional scale using freely available Landsat data (30m), corresponding to 33 years of continuous coverage. We used tree h...

Стр. 35-37 В докладе приводится краткий обзор методики и результатов создания карты заброшенных земель для Восточной Европы, на основе космических снимков и автоматических методов обработки.

Стр. 153-155 В докладе приводится краткий обзор результатов мониторинга малонарушенных лесных территорий (МЛТ) в 2013-2016 гг. на основе дистанционных данных – анализ по странам, биогеографическим регионам, тренды с 2000 года. Представлен собственный метод выделения природоохранной значимости участков МЛТ для дальнейшего использования в глобальных...

2019): Contrasting tree-cover loss and subsequent land cover in two neotropical forest regions: sample-based assessment of the Mexican Yucatán and Argentine Chaco, Journal of Land Use Science To link to this article: https://doi. ABSTRACT The neotropical-forest's northern and southern extremes, covering the Mexican Yucatán and the Argentine Chaco,...

Significance As Brazil’s cropland expands as a result of increasing demand for commodity crops, new croplands replace existing land covers and land uses. Our study employs the most spatially detailed historical record of satellite imagery available to show that the area of intensive row cropping in Brazil nearly doubled from 2000 to 2014 mainly bec...

In this Letter, errors in Supplementary Table 1 have been corrected.

A regional assessment of forest disturbance dynamics from 2000 to 2014 was performed for the Congo Basin countries using time-series satellite data. Area of forest loss was estimated and disaggregated by predisturbance forest type and direct disturbance driver. An estimated 84% of forest disturbance area in the region is due to small-scale, nonmech...

Land change is a cause and consequence of global environmental change1,2. Changes in land use and land cover considerably alter the Earth's energy balance and biogeochemical cycles, which contributes to climate change and-in turn-affects land surface properties and the provision of ecosystem services1-4. However, quantification of global land chang...

Humid tropical forests provide numerous global ecosystem services, but are under continuing threat of clearing from economic drivers. Here, we report primary humid tropical forest extent for the year 2001, and primary forest loss and distance to loss from 2002–2014 for the largest rainforest countries of Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR...

While publicly available, cost-free coarse and medium spatial resolution satellite data such as MODIS and Landsat perform well in characterizing industrial cropping systems, commercial high spatial resolution satellite data are often preferred alternative for fine scale land tenure agricultural systems such as found in Pakistan. In this article, we...

As the terrestrial human footprint continues to expand, the amount of native forest that is free from significant damaging human activities is in precipitous decline. There is emerging evidence that the remaining intact forest supports an exceptional confluence of globally significant environmental values relative to degraded forests, including imp...

This chapter describes the first research to quantify air pollution emissions at a moderate to coarse scale from agricultural burning in Belarus, Lithuania, and European Russia using MODIS and Landsat-based estimates of fire, land-cover and land-use. Agricultural burning in Belarus, Lithuania, and European Russia showed a strong and consistent seas...

Significance Most nations recently agreed to hold global average temperature rise to well below 2 °C. We examine how much climate mitigation nature can contribute to this goal with a comprehensive analysis of “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or...

A novel approach for satellite-based comprehensive national tree cover change assessment was developed and applied in Bangladesh, a country where trees outside of forests play an important role in the national economy and carbon sequestration. Tree cover change area was quantified using the integration of wall-to-wall Landsat-based mapping with a h...

An error in the unit conversion from pixels to hectares lead to all the areal quantities in the text being smaller than they should have been. Only the number of hectares were changed; none of the text nor tables were changed. The changes do not affect the overall results or conclusions.

We performed a rapid global assessment of the availability and robustness of conservation strategies for ecoregions. In some cases this involved assessment of large regions composed of multiple ecoregions. We found ecoregion and regional conservation strategies through internet searches, guided by Google Search Engine, Google Scholar, literature ci...

We assess progress toward the protection of 50% of the terrestrial biosphere to address the species-extinction crisis and conserve a global ecological heritage for future generations. Using a map of Earth's 846 terrestrial ecoregions, we show that 98 ecoregions (12%) exceed Half Protected; 313 ecoregions (37%) fall short of Half Protected but have...

As sources of data for global forest monitoring grow larger, more complex and numerous, data analysis and interpretation become critical bottlenecks for effectively using them to inform land use policy discussions. Here in this paper, we present a method that combines big data analytical tools with Emerging Hot Spot Analysis (ArcGIS) to identify st...

An intact forest landscape (IFL) is a seamless mosaic of forest and naturally treeless ecosystems with no remotely detected signs of human activity and a minimum area of 500 km². IFLs are critical for stabilizing terrestrial carbon storage, harboring biodiversity, regulating hydrological regimes, and providing other ecosystem functions. Although th...

This data set provides mapped estimates of the stand age of young (less than 25 years old) larch forests across Siberia from 1989-2012 at 30-m resolution. The age estimates were derived from Landsat-based composites and tree cover for years 2000 and 2012 developed by the Global Forest Change (GFC) project and the stand-replacing fire mapping (SRFM)...

This chapter includes a list of the study areas and a map of their localities. The dominant ecological-coenotic approach to the forest vegetation classification together with seven ecological-coenotic groups of plant species and their ecological characteristics are described. The methods of mapping and monitoring the forest cover together with a sh...

Time series of Landsat data were employed to map and quantify changes in forest cover within European Russia from 1985 to 2012. Results of this automated satellite image processing may serve as a baseline for further analyses of forest dynamics and its drivers.

Стр. 17-21 Малонарушеные лесные территории (МЛТ) – последние сохранившиеся крупные лесные массивы, не преобразованные деятельностью человека. В 2014 г. проанализировано сокращение МЛТ за 2000-2013 годы. Около 20% всех лесов мира являются малонарушенными. Площадь МЛТ в мире сократилась на 7,2%. Основной причиной деградации МЛТ является фрагментация...

Appendix S1. Supplemental analysis, methodological detail, and data. Figure S1. Benchmark gross deforestation rates for (a) all countries within the pantropical study area; (b) Brazil; (c) Indonesia primary forests; (d) all tropical signatories of the New York Declaration on Forests; and (e) remaining tropical forested countries that did not sign...

Wheat is a staple food of Pakistan’s population of more than 180 million. The average annual harvest of 24 million tonnes places Pakistan eighth in the world in wheat production. Roughly, 76% of wheat is produced by Punjab province, the breadbasket of Pakistan. The current wheat area and yield reporting system operated by the Punjab Crop Reporting...

In his Perspective “Ancient grasslands at risk” (8 January, p. [120][1]), W. J. Bond makes a compelling argument for the need to identify, study, and preserve ancient grassland ecosystems because of their ecological importance. We strongly agree. However, we disagree with his claim that our

Landsat time-series multi-spectral data, GLAS (Geoscience Laser Altimeter System) height data and a regression tree model were used to estimate tree height for a transect in Sub-Saharan Africa ranging from the Sahara Desert through the Congo Basin to the Kalahari Desert (+22 to −22° latitude and 23 to 24° longitude). Objectives included comparing t...

A Landsat-based humid tropical forest disturbance alert was implemented for Peru, the Republic of Congo and Kalimantan, Indonesia. Alerts were mapped on a weekly basis as new terrain-corrected Landsat 7 and 8 images were made available; results are presented for all of 2014 and through September 2015. The three study areas represent different stage...

The most important environmental goals at the global level, relating to forests, are conservation of biological diversity in the natural environment of its habitat and preservation of the environmental role (especially regarding the climate) of forests. Major forest areas, not fragmented by infrastructure and preserving the diversity of relationshi...

Aim Tropical forest degradation is a significant source of carbon emissions due to selective logging, fragmentation and other disturbance factors. However, methods for mapping and monitoring pan‐tropical forest degradation are still in their infancy. Here we present a new and automated approach to differentiate forests likely to be affected by degr...

Halving carbon emissions from tropical deforestation by 2020 could help bring the international community closer to the agreed goal of <2 degree increase in global average temperature change and is consistent with a target set last year by the governments, corporations, indigenous peoples organizations and non-governmental organizations that signed...

Shifting cultivation has traditionally been practiced in the Democratic Republic of Congo by carving agricultural fields out of primary and secondary forest, resulting in the rural complex: a characteristic land cover mosaic of roads, villages, active and fallow fields and secondary forest. Forest clearing has varying impacts depending on where it...

We present a new binary (two-class) supervised non-parametric classification approach that is based on iterative partitioning of multidimensional feature space into variably-sized and nested hyper-cubes (partitions). The proposed method contains elements of active learning and includes classifier to analyst queries. The spectral transition zone bet...

Tropical forests provide global climate regulation ecosystem services and their clearing is a significant source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resultant radiative forcing of climate change. However, consensus on pan-tropical forest carbon dynamics is lacking. We present a new estimate that employs recommended good practices to...

Dramatic political and economic changes in Eastern European countries following the dissolution of the “Eastern Bloc” and the collapse of the Soviet Union greatly affected land-cover and land-use trends. In particular, changes in forest cover dynamics may be attributed to the collapse of the planned economy, agricultural land abandonment, economy l...

J. W. Veldman et al. argue that the world's ancient (old-growth) grasslands should be spared from restoration-motivated tree planting (“Tyranny of trees in grassy biomes,” Letters, 30 January, p. [484][1]). We strongly agree. However, they also claim that the global Atlas of Forest Landscape

Significance Our paper is significant in a number of respects. First, we expand the literature on quasi-experimental evaluation of the causal impact of conservation measures to include agricultural concessions. Second, our report is rare in that we use panel data and techniques in a literature on spatially explicit land-use change econometrics that...

Transparent, consistent, and accurate national forest monitoring is required for successful implementation of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) programs. Collecting baseline information on forest extent and rates of forest loss is a first step for national forest monitoring in support of REDD+. Peru, with the seco...

Policy makers, government planners and agricultural market participants in Pakistan require accurate and timely information about wheat yield and production. Punjab Province is by far the most important wheat producing region in the country. The manual collection of field data and data processing for crop forecasting by the provincial government re...

The World's Last Intact Forest Landscapes by Greenpeace as of 2013

The presented study quantifies the proportion of stand-replacement fires in Russian forests through the integrated analysis of Landsat and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data products. We employed 30 m Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus derived tree canopy cover and decadal (2001–2012) forest cover loss (Hansen et al 2013...

Extensive clearing of Indonesian primary forests results in increased greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. However, there is no consensus on the areal extent and temporal trends of primary forest clearing in Indonesia. Here we report a spatially and temporally explicit quantification of Indonesian primary forest loss, which totalled over...

Tropek et al. critique the Hansen et al. global forest loss paper in terms of its utility and accuracy. Both criticisms suffer from a miscomprehension of the definition of forest employed as well as the requirements of product validation. Utility of the product is enhanced through its integration with forest type, carbon stock, protected area statu...

Wetlands play an important role in the provision of ecosystem services, ranging from the regulation of hydrological systems to carbon sequestration and biodiversity habitat. This paper reports the mapping of Indonesia’s wetland cover as a single thematic class, including peatlands, freshwater wetlands, and mangroves. Expert-interpreted training dat...