Abstract
Russian forests preserve biodiversity, host endemic species, store carbon, and are inhabited by indigenous people. However, in the last years, large areas of these forests have been damaged by different factors, mainly by logging and fires. This led to important tree loss even in protected areas. Despite it, no previous comprehensive research has been conducted to understand the trends and the causes of this tree loss. This study aims to investigate how Russian protected areas effectively contribute to nature conservation and can reduce forest loss within their borders. For the first time, we analysed the longest time-series available (2001–2018) of tree loss and fires in 201 Russian protected areas (those with the highest protection level). Studying the temporal trends of forest loss, we hypothesized that uncontrolled wildfire should result as the main cause of the forest loss expected within the highest protection areas of Russia and that logging and other anthropogenic activities - because prohibited in these areas - should be a minor threat. Instead, from Earth Observation datasets, we detected that even in the 201 areas with the highest protection, more than 2Mha of forests have been lost between 2001 and 2018. Fire contributed about 25% to this loss but was not the major driver. From a year-by-year analysis of the time series, we were able to disentangle the potential contribution of “other-than-fire” causes of loss. We found that, in 15 out of 18 years of our time series, causes not due to fire were the main driver of tree loss in these strictly protected areas, which reached a peak recently, between 2013 and 2018. Overall, of the 201 strictly protected areas in Russia, 135 experienced tree loss between 2001 and 2018. In 34 of them, the loss was higher than 10,000 ha, where a major percentage was attributable to fire only in 3 sites. In the other 31 protected areas, fire contributed to the total forest loss less than 50%. Our analysis also showed that five strictly protected areas experienced a massive tree loss (> 100kha) from 2001 to 2018. Among them, Lake Baikal, a World Heritage site, suffered an astonishing forest loss of 485 k ha, whose only 21% may be attributed to fire. Considering that we discovered that most of the causes of forest loss may be related to human activities, the situation could be controlled through better management and policy.