A natural forest is a generally multilayered vegetation unit dominated by trees (largely evergreen or semi-deciduous), whose combined strata have overlapping crowns (i.e. the crown cover is 75% or more), and where grasses in the herbaceous stratum (if present) are generally rare. Fire does not normally play a major role in forest function or dynamics except at the fringes.
Source: Shackleton, 1999

The total mapped area of natural forest (also called indigenous forest) in South Africa is approximately 0,5 million ha. The large Afro-temperate forests of the southern Cape, although distributed close to the coast, are aligned with the inland forest types of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Limpopo Province. This is because the southernly temperate latitudes compensate for the altitude of inland forests.

Historical change in indigenous forest area was investigated in the Karkloof/Balgowan region of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands (Eeley, Lawes & Macfarlane 2002). A relatively small reduction (less than 6%) in total forest area was recorded from 1944 to 1996 but there was a substantial loss of small forest patches (<0.5ha). This study emphasised the importance of mapping indigenous forests at a fine scale (to include forests patches less than 1 ha in extent). Earlier mapping projects, albeit at a provincial or national scale, used a minimum mapping unit of 50 ha a scale - far too large to capture the widely dispersed and patchy nature of indigenous forests in the country.