Abstract
Climatic and anthropogenic disturbances have led to intense small-scale tree cover loss in global forests. However, it remains unclear when forest attributes at a large scale (e.g., 0.05° resolution) will decline in response to such sub-grid (e.g., 30-m) tree cover losses within forest ecosystems. Utilizing global maps of forest attribute proxies, we discover that vegetation greenness, canopy structure, composition, and photosynthesis function can all increase under limited tree cover loss, indicating a widely existing safety margin in global forests that is primarily buffered by a positive edge effect of landscape fragmentation within forest ecosystems. The safety margin varies across biomes (tropical: 7.7%; temperate: 3.7%; boreal: 1.0%) and is often positively correlated with ecosystem resistance. In addition, about 35.7% of the remaining global forests have exceeded the safety margin. Our finding contrasts with the conventional perception that sub-grid tree cover losses are inevitably associated with declines in forest attributes and functions. It provides quantitative information for mitigating forest degradation and has strong implications for sustainable forest management practices.
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Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential
Potential tree cover under current and future climate scenarios
Regional uniqueness of tree species composition and response to forest loss and climate change
Data availability
All data used in this study are available online as follows: Global Forest Watch (GFW) tree cover images from https://storage.googleapis.com/earthenginepartners-hansen/GFC-2024-v1.12/download.html; MODIS MCD12C1 Land Cover images from https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/MCD12C1; MODIS MOD13Q1 NDVI, EVI datasets from https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/MOD13Q1; MODIS MOD15A2H LAI datasets from https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/MOD15A2H; BDI from https://gee-community-catalog.org/projects/bii/; Penman-Monteith-Leuning Evapotranspiration GPP datasets from https://github.com/gee-hydro/gee_PML; Global ‘OCO-2’ SIF dataset from https://globalecology.unh.edu/data/GOSIF.html; MODIS MOD11C3 LST datasets from https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/missions-and-measurements/products/MOD11C3; TerraClimate VPD and SM datasets from https://www.climatologylab.org/terraclimate.html; GLASS PAR and FPAR datasets from https://glass.hku.hk/download.html. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The Python code for this study is archived on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/1575387654.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (X.Z.C.: 2024YFF1306600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (W.Q.Z.: No. 42225104, Y.X.S.: No. 42471326, and Y.G.Z.: No. 42125105), the Science and Technology Program of Guangdong (X.Z.C.: No. 2024B1212070012), and the General Program of Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (X.Z.C.: 2024A1515012731).
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Y.X.S. designed the study and wrote the initial manuscript; J.R.W., C.Q.Z., and Y.X.P. collected the data and performed the analyses; P.C., T.S., J.L.S., J.L., J.M.C., A.C., Y.G.Z., W.F.L., C.S., Z.Y.Z., J.B.L., R.L., K.Y., P.Z., X.B.G., X.L., M.M.X., W.P.Y., X.Z.C., and W.Q.Z. reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Wang, J., Zhang, C., Pan, Y. et al. The safety margin of small-scale tree cover loss in global fragmented forests.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71480-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71480-2
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