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  • Are there closed-canopy oil palm plantations?
  • We present a map of closed-canopy oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) plantations by typology (industrial versus smallholder plantations) at the global scale and with unprecedented detail (10 m resolution) for the year 2019.
  • How reliable is the global oil palm map?
  • Figure A7 Oil palm surface per country generated with the global oil palm map (2019) and extracted from the FAOSTAT “harvested area” for the year 2018. The error bar in the global oil palm map shows the confidence interval with a confidence level of 95 %. Figure A8 Smallholder oil palm planted right up to the river edge in Sumatra.
  • What is an industrial oil palm plantation?
  • An industrial oil palm plantation is defined as an oil palm plantation that typically covers several thousand hectares of land and is very well structured and homogeneous in tree age, and a smallholder plantation is defined as an oil palm plantation that is "typically smaller than 25 ha" (Descals et al., 2021). ... ...
  • How can we meet global palm oil demand sustainably?
  • To meet the rising global palm oil demand sustainably, we tracked annual land cover changes in oil palm plantation and mapped areas worldwide suitable for sustainable oil palm cultivation. From 1982 to 2019, 3.6 Mha of forests were converted to oil palm plantations.
  • What is the distribution of oil palm in Indonesia and Malaysia?
  • Koh et al. (2011), who mapped the distribution of oil palm in Indonesia and Malaysia using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) archives, found that by the early 2000s, approximately 6% of peatland in this region had been converted for oil palm plantations.
  • What data is needed to reproduce the global oil palm map?
  • The Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images taken in 2019 are the only data necessary to reproduce the results of the global oil palm map. The rest is auxiliary data used for the identification of the oil palm distribution, the visual interpretation of oil palm plantation, and the comparison with other oil palm maps.