What is it about?
Forests play a key role in mitigating climate change, yet previous studies have focused mainly on changes in forest cover, with much less attention given to changes in forest spatial configuration. Fragmentation is a major form of such configuration change and can also alter forest thermal environments. Using fine-resolution remote-sensing data, we disentangled these two influences across global forests. We found that greater fragmentation was generally associated with higher land surface temperature across most forest regions. However, in high-latitude boreal forests where background air temperature fell below about 0 °C, increasing fragmentation was associated with cooling. This reversal was also evident seasonally in temperate and boreal forests during the coldest months. We further found that fragmentation had a stronger influence on land surface temperature than forest cover across 48% of global forests.
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Why is it important?
The role of fragmentation in regulating forest temperature has received much less attention than forest cover, yet our results show that its influence can be equally important and even stronger in some regions. This means that policies focusing mainly on forest area may misjudge the actual climate benefits of forest restoration. Forest management should therefore consider not only increasing forest area, but also protecting intact forests and limiting further fragmentation. Accounting for forest fragmentation should become an integral part of sustainable forest management and climate-related planning.
Perspectives
Forests are central to climate mitigation and broader sustainability goals, yet their value is still often judged mainly by how much forest area is lost or restored. Large-scale forest restoration is clearly important, but changes in forest area and fragmentation do not always move in the same direction. Also, their effects can reinforce or offset one another. I hope this work encourages a wider view of forest change, as overlooking forest fragmentation may lead us to misjudge the true ecological value of forests.
Jiawei Li
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fragmentation outweighs forest cover in shaping land surface temperature across half of global forests, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2615021123.
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