I have have big doubts on the methodology used to generate this maps. The map seems completely wrong for France, there is a big red mark on the biggest forest of France (Landes) but I can assure you that the forest is still there and will be there for a long time.
Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#32I’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.
Pollarding (not the same as topping) is very common in cities to prevent trees becoming monsters that block out all light (that 40m oak might look nice from far off, but nothing else grows under that canopy, and someone might want to see sky from their garden), can't be maintained easily and eventually become safety issues with huge windage and heavy, old, brittle branches that can break off and fall (or the whole thing goes down in a storm and takes a house with it).
A pollarded tree looks stark and misshapen when it's done, but the foliage will return bushier and denser in fairly short order.
Pollarded trees can also live longer because not only do they not blow over so often, they stay in a juvenile state of young growth longer.
Re: Tree cover loss – 2001-2020
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Thanks for the link; that's helpful. It also confirms that the worry that indeed it's quite tricky to interpret this data; even with the best of intentions errors are quite plausible.
It's still interesting, it just means we should see these efforts as narrow, potentially distorted perspectives on the ground truth; and therefore we need to remain open to the fact that other reasonable perspectives might show different trends.