Tropical dry woodlands are rapidly being lost to agricultural expansion, but how deforestation dynamics play out in these woodlands remains poorly understood. Better understanding these deforestation dynamics is critically important to develop strategies towards more sustainable tropical dry woodlands futures. Here, we use high-resolution time-series of tree cover from 2000 to 2020 to develop an approach to detect and map high-level patterns of deforestation frontiers, i.e., the expansion of woodland loss, across continents in unprecedented spatio-temporal detail. Our approach enables consistent, repeatable frontier monitoring, and our global frontier typology fosters comparative research and context-specific policy making.