I guess I'm surprised that Finland & Sweden lost so much tree cover. Is that due to Ikea?
If you zoom in you see a patchwork of blue and pink, so it seems like just cycling through different areas for cutting and regrowth.
Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#22I’ve lived in newer suburban neighborhoods where some of the homeowners would cut their developer-planted trees down to branchless stubs, just as the trees were about to grow. I wonder what would explain the aversion to a tree. I suppose they don’t want to clean leaves during fall. The beauty of nature be damned, if even one is aware of it in this instance. I’ve also lived in the city of San Francisco. The Department…
in LA, it's that time of the year where they butcher all the street trees for no discernable reason (the stated reasons like safety make no real sense). it's infuriating. we need more cover, not less, in this drying desert area.
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#23I’ve lived in newer suburban neighborhoods where some of the homeowners would cut their developer-planted trees down to branchless stubs, just as the trees were about to grow. I wonder what would explain the aversion to a tree. I suppose they don’t want to clean leaves during fall. The beauty of nature be damned, if even one is aware of it in this instance. I’ve also lived in the city of San Francisco. The Department…
Those suburbanites were probably doing some variation of coppicing their trees, to keep them stunted and bushy for aesthetics.
I lived in San Francisco, too, and helped to plant dozens of trees with FUF (https://www.fuf.net/). You can't just randomly plant a tree along a sidewalk; some trees do badly in cities, attract pests, or drop inedible fruit that attracts vermin.
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#24I’ve lived in newer suburban neighborhoods where some of the homeowners would cut their developer-planted trees down to branchless stubs, just as the trees were about to grow. I wonder what would explain the aversion to a tree. I suppose they don’t want to clean leaves during fall. The beauty of nature be damned, if even one is aware of it in this instance. I’ve also lived in the city of San Francisco. The Department…
Some of the reasons are that trees are equated with gentrification and raising the values of that block, thus raised rents.
That's abominable. Does that really happen?
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#25That pink/blue distinction is really hard to visually nail down. Is the Southeast US gaining or losing coverage?
There's no way to compare them because the data sets are for different time periods. The losses are for 2001-2020 but the gains are only for 2001-2012.
I don't know about specific regions, but forests worldwide are doing fine. In 1990, the world had 4.13 billion hectares of forest. In 2017 that number was 4 billion hectares.[1] That's not bad considering world population increased 40% in that time.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area#primary-vs-planted-fo...
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#26How is this reconciled with the NASA 2016 report that the "Change in Leaf Area" was largely positive from 1982-2015?
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#27That pink/blue distinction is really hard to visually nail down. Is the Southeast US gaining or losing coverage?
There's no way to compare them because the data sets are for different time periods. The losses are for 2001-2020 but the gains are only for 2001-2012. I don't know about specific regions, but forests worldwide are doing fine. In 1990, the world had 4.13 billion hectares of forest. In 2017 that number was 4 billion hectares.[1] That's not bad considering world population increased 40% in that time. 1. https://ourworl…
I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions from that dataset. Many if not most forests are managed and logged; not all of that logging is necessarily on the public books nor does it imply complete deforestation; Legal logging typically requires a certain amount of regrowth to satisfy regulations (whether national or to satisfy carbon offsets). However, a sapling is not equivalent to a centuries old giant. Some afforestation targets permit a very, very low tree cover to be considered wooded. And if trees are being replanted; how is biodiversity doing? People have a tendency to pick cheap solutions (which is perfectly reasonable!), but that also means we should be careful we don't misinterpret simplistic coverage metrics as saying more than they do.
I looked (quickly, and therefore poorly, I'm sure), but I couldn't see anything in the ourworldindata sources that tries to distinguish the quality of forest left. I'm likely missing something, admittedly; I'll keep looking, if I find a link to their methodology I'll post an update.
They seem to be gather data from the UN FAO forestry project, and also other sources. I still haven't found any in those sources that account for the size of the trees; but ourworldindata does indirectly include some evidence that size may have reduced - the UN FAO source estimates forest coverage has dropped by almost exactly a third; but the tree number (where tree is defined as being 10cm in diamater at breast height) has fallen by almost half. However, since the sources use wildly different methodologies, I'm sure there might be other causes for the discrepancy, but in any case - it still highlights that interpreting these numbers isn't entirely trivial.
(Incidently, the same caveats likely hold for the globalforestwatch.org site; there too it's not obvious what they're actually measuring, nor how well they can do that, nor how close whatever metric they've got aligns with whatever you actually care about.)
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#28That pink/blue distinction is really hard to visually nail down. Is the Southeast US gaining or losing coverage?
There's no way to compare them because the data sets are for different time periods. The losses are for 2001-2020 but the gains are only for 2001-2012. I don't know about specific regions, but forests worldwide are doing fine. In 1990, the world had 4.13 billion hectares of forest. In 2017 that number was 4 billion hectares.[1] That's not bad considering world population increased 40% in that time. 1. https://ourworl…
I don't have the ability to give a highly researched and informed response to this currently, but I disagree with the claim that 'forests worldwide are doing fine'. I don't think you can make a well-educated argument from looking at global aggregated numbers of land classification for a ~25 year time period. Biodiversity, ecosystem connectivity, indigenous rights, agricultural competition, surface water quality, and legal regulations are all important framings to consider as well. Also, while 1990 is a while ago in human terms, it is hyper recent if you think about the destruction of forests over the past 12-thousand years of human-induced landscape disturbance.
I agree that limiting forest loss has been one of the more prominent victories in the environmental space, along with halting ozone depletion. Happy to pat some colleagues on the back for that success...
Dropping this resource from WRI: https://research.wri.org/gfr/global-forest-review
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way to compare them because the data sets are for different time periods. The losses are for 2001-2020 but the gains are only for 2001-2012. I don't know about specific regions, but forests worldwide are doing fine. In 1990, the world had 4.13 billion hectares of forest. In 2017 that number was 4 billion hectares.[1] That's not bad considering world population increased 40% in that time. 1. https://ourworl…
I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions from that dataset. Many if not most forests are managed and logged; not all of that logging is necessarily on the public books nor does it imply complete deforestation; Legal logging typically requires a certain amount of regrowth to satisfy regulations (whether national or to satisfy carbon offsets). However, a sapling is not equivalent to a centuries old giant. Some affor…
I agree context and intricacies are everything. On your point about GFW, I know the team is very conscious and attentive to communicating what the data means.
This link might be helpful: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/help/map/faqs/
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#30So just to add some extra regional colour to this, it's not all down to deforestation for the purposes of farming or logging[0]. There's some pretty gruesome losses in the South Bohemia region of Czech Republic (around Telč and Dačice) which have an interesting backstory. Trying to recall an information board I read, so it may be a little bit spotty. But there was a big movement about planting spruce forests last century, which has now turned out to be a fairly vulnerable tree to a particular bark beetle (referred to as "kurovec" iirc) and ultimately wasn't very suitable in many of the areas it was planted anyway as tended to die and rot in the warmer climate of South Bohemia. This means that vast swathes of forest that previously appeared to be ok are now under threat and basically need to be felled.
So what you see when you go through there are pretty substantial areas of felled trees. We went a few years in a row to somewhere near a little village called "Zvůle") and the difference was shocking for the years 2019 and 2020. If you look both sides of the road here you get an idea of what I mean - https://www.google.com/maps/@49.0877897,15.2336907,3a,90y,61... Notice that basically all of the remaining trees have been marked, so they'll have been felled too.
[0] - I'm sure in this case they put the wood to good use, but I think they would have preferred to keep the forest as-is
edit: found the area I'm talking about on the map: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsib...
I imagine much of the green remaining there is just waiting for someone to come cut it down.