A review of the intact forest landscape concept in the Canadian boreal forest: its history, value, and measurement

Loss of global forest, and in particular forest that has little human disturbance, is a standard against which we measure progress to conserve Earth’s forests. The value of intact forest landscapes has taken hold in the global psyche. We provide a brief history of the intact forest landscape concept and discuss how this has moved to an operational definition used as a global and regional metric of forest conservation. We distinguish between a conceptual intact forest landscape and an operational definition. For the purposes of this paper we will use the term IFL to mean the operational definition and intact forest landscapes to mean the conceptual idea. We provide an overview of the science that supports the value of intact forest landscapes in a Canadian boreal context and analyse issues with using a standard operationalized IFL definition to both measure and promote conservation of forests at global and regional scales. We found many arguments for protecting large, intact forest landscapes that are rele...