ActSmall · Forest

About ActSmall · Forest

A small, slowly-growing library of source-cited material about forests — especially old-growth forests — alongside a country map of forest cover, intact-forest extent, and protected land. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to forest.

What this topic is

The world has plenty of forest content already. A great deal of it is excellent: government technical reports, academic ecology, indigenous land stewardship records, conservation NGOs, wildlife photographers, foresters who write well. The problem the next generation has is not a lack of material — it is access. The technical material is hard to find without already knowing where to look. The popular material is often too thin, too partisan, or buried under engagement traps. Most of the in-between is locked behind paywalls or signup forms.

This site exists to be a small, durable, signup-free middle layer: a citable starting point that points readers toward the better, deeper, harder material as soon as they are ready for it. The unit of value is the seed — a self-contained primer, country snapshot, or project card that someone can read in fifteen minutes and walk away from already understanding more than they did, with named sources to dig into next.

Editorial care specific to forest

  • Industry-respectful, practice-critical. Forestry is a real industry that supplies real materials we all use. The point of this site is not to vilify the industry. The point is to teach the next generation to evaluate practices, not to oppose industries. Selective harvest in second-growth, indigenous-led forestry, FSC-certified plantations, and old-growth protection can all coexist with each other and with a working economy. Clear-cutting primary forest cannot.
  • AI imagery is disclosed. Cover images on primer pages, where present, are generated by an AI image model and carry a small “AI-generated illustration” badge so the viewer knows. They are atmospheric, not documentary — we never use AI to depict a specific named place. Photographs of specific places are credited to a human photographer with a verifiable source link.
  • Synthesised narration is disclosed. Audio on primer pages, where present, is generated from the written text by a text-to-speech model and carries a small “Synthesised narration” badge. The voice is not impersonating any particular person.

The shared editorial posture — source-cited, plain English, no engagement loops, no donations — lives at actsmall.org/about/.

Data sources for forest

The country map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~17:53 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda. The library’s primers cite their own sources at the bottom of each page; the umbrella sources we lean on most heavily:

  • Old-growth definitions and structure. USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station technical reports (Franklin, Spies et al. 1981 onward); Wirth, Gleixner, Heimann (eds.), Old-Growth Forests: Function, Fate and Value (Springer, 2009); Frelich, Forest Dynamics and Disturbance Regimes (Cambridge, 2002).
  • Global forest cover and loss. Global Forest Watch (World Resources Institute), with primary data from the Hansen et al. global forest-cover-change product (University of Maryland), the Intact Forest Landscapes mapping (Greenpeace / WRI / WCS / Transparent World), and the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment.
  • Protected areas. World Database on Protected Areas (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN).
  • Indigenous-led forestry and land stewardship. Cited per primer; we lean on primary sources from First Nations, Máori iwi, Sami councils, and Amazon Basin indigenous federations directly where they have published.
  • Citizen-science contributions. iNaturalist for species observations.

How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.

Where to read more