Ilona ZHURAVLEVA

Greenpeace Russia Mapping Lab Head

Ilona Zhuravelva is a head of GIS&Remote Sensing Lab working at Greenpeace Russia since 2005. She is coordinating Greenpeace Global Mapping Hub starting 2017 – community of GIS specialists in Greenpeace worldwide. She is also one of the leaders of Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) chapter in Russia, the main activity of which is providing trainings in GIS and Remote Sensing for conservation NGOs and organizing a conference for NGOs and other conservation GIS organizations in order to support GIS-Conservations network in a country. Her main expertize is in monitoring of wilderness areas with remote sensing and active fire/burned area assessment. Particulary she is involved in a global Intact Forest Landscapes mapping and monitoring (2000, 2013, 2016) project together with researchers from University of Maryland, World Resource institute, WWF-Russia and others conducting also some regional monitoring projects for Indonesia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Canada and Russia since the first global map was launched. She is working on fire dynamic spatial analysis mostly in boreal countries – one of the main focus is in Fire return intervals in the world’s northern forests assesment that is annually updated.

> Monitoring approach, spatial patterns and conservation priorities for the Last Forest Wildlands

Forests are vanishing in many parts of the world and often at the expense of remaining biodiversity-rich frontiers. Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL) are the largest terrestrial ecosystems, which remain for decades without the signs of human activity. To suit for wide-ranging species the patches of IFLs should not be less than 500 km2 without narrow corridors. Maps of IFLs were produced for circa 2000 and updated for 2013 and 2016 with Sentinel-2A and Landsat imagery. The results showed approximately 30% of global forests comprised IFLs, of which 9.3% were lost in 2000-2016. Core IFLs that require urgent conservation actions were defined on the basis of conservation (species diversity and endemism, ecosystem functioning and resilience to climate change) and vulnerability indicators (IFL patch loss area and tree cover loss inside).  From 2000 to 2016 agriculture was the dominant cause of IFL loss  in tropical America, logging in Africa, SE Asia, southern boreal/temperate North America and Eurasia. Primarily human-induced forest fires were the main cause of IFL decline in North America and Eurasia, while fossil fuel extraction in Australia and northern boreal Eurasia. Spatial data and methodology of IFL mapping.