After Russia's, the world's largest expanse of frontier forest is an unbroken 6,500-kilometer arc of boreal forest stretching from Newfoundland to Alaska. These North American forest ecosystems -- still vast and relatively undisturbed in northernmost Canada and interior Alaska -- store a significant proportion of the global total of biotic carbon and supply much of the world's growing demand for forest products. They also provide livelihoods for thousands of indigenous people and a refuge for woodland caribou, grizzly bear, grey wolf, and other large mammals that once ranged widely across the continent.[42] As a group, these frontiers rank among the least threatened in the world (approximately a quarter of the area is threatened). Even so, they are being pushed steadily northward by mineral extraction, hydroelectric development, and skyrocketing demand for wood fiber, especially paper products.

To the south, North America's temperate frontier forests have retreated to a few remote mountainous pockets in the western United States and Canada. Within the lower 48 U.S. states, frontiers account for about 1 percent of original forest cover. What remains lies primarily within three assemblages of national parks and wilderness areas in the northern Rockies and one block in the North Cascades of Washington state. While each forest block is largely protected, they are classified as threatened because they are becoming too isolated to support populations of some of their large mammal species over time.[43]

In Mexico, one relatively large frontier remains in the Sierra Madre Occidental, a biologically diverse temperate conifer forest severely threatened by rapidly expanding logging and road construction. Mexico's other frontier forests are in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Maya forest region (which extends into Belize and Guatemala). These tropical forests -- along with a chain of others stretching south through the Miskito coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, the La Amistad region on the Costa Rican-Panamanian border, and the Darien forests on Panama's border with Colombia -- are almost all highly threatened.

Central America's frontier forests are under many kinds of assault. In the Darien region, the major threat is completion of the Pan American highway. (See below.) In other areas, agricultural expansion, logging, and infrastructure development are the dangers. Guatemala's forest frontier, for example, shrank dramatically in the past decade as logging roads opened the area to landless peasants and to wealthy agricultural business interests.

On the whole, North America still has a good number of frontier forests in its northernmost regions that remain relatively safe. Yet from its southern band of boreal forests all the way to Panama's Darien Gap, virtually all the rest of the continent's frontiers stand to lose their frontier status within the next decade or two.

References and notes

42. World Wildlife Fund, The Official World Wildlife Fund Guide to Endangered Species of North America, (Washington: Beacham Publishing Inc., 1990), pp. 446, 534, 549.

43. Development and degradation of surrounding non-protected forest area threatens the ecological integrity of these sites, which barely qualified as frontier forest under the WRI criteria. Refer to Technical Annex for details.

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Threatened frontiers include:

Frontier: 1. Tongass National Forest
Forest type: Temperate
Geographic location: Alaska, United States
Threat: Logging
At risk: One of the world's largest tracts of temperate old-growth forest, as well as a unique ecosystem type: coastal temperate rainforest.
Frontier: 2. Forests of the Darien Gap
Forest type: Tropical
Geographic location: Panama and Colombia
Threat: Logging, other wood removal, proposed highway construction, and coca cultivation
At risk: A proposed highway across the Darien Gap would provide a route for non-indigenous species -- such as organisms that cause hoof-and-mouth disease -- with potentially disastrous long-term biological and economic consequences to both regions.[44],[45] Road construction, logging, and other activities threaten forests that are home to three indigenous cultures and rich native biodiversity.

References and notes

42. World Wildlife Fund, The Official World Wildlife Fund Guide to Endangered Species of North America, (Washington: Beacham Publishing Inc., 1990), pp. 446, 534, 549.

43. Development and degradation of surrounding non-protected forest area threatens the ecological integrity of these sites, which barely qualified as frontier forest under the WRI criteria. Refer to Technical Annex for details.

44. Chuck Carr, personal communication, 1996.

45. Robin Hanbury-Tension, "A Bridge Too Far?," Geographical Magazine, Vol. 68, No. 1, January 1996, p. 35.