The first peer-reviewed map of the world's megaforests was the result of an improbable collaboration between the Swedish furniture maker Ikea and the environmental activist organization Greenpeace. They were thrust together following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia's forests — including a mature and verdant demilitarized zone knows as the Green Belt of Fennoscandia — were opened up to European timber companies. Roads and logging began to eat away at the landscape until environmentalists began to protest. Ikea wanted wood and Greenpeace wanted to protect special parts of the forest, places of extraordinarily complex webs of organisms.
To find out where their interests aligned, they needed a map. In the following years, an international group of scientists assembled one, but went beyond Russia, searching for major forests on all continents, eventually encompassing the globe's tropical and boreal regions. In 2008, they released a cartographic marvel: a map of 5 million square miles of intact forest making up 2.6 percent of the planet's land area. It required 150 billion pixels.
