Aug 12, 2017

Tree Growth

In the United States, which contains eight percent of the world's forests, there are more trees than there were a hundred years ago. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, "Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920."

The U.S. had 319 million people in 2014 and 228 billion trees. The greatest gains have been seen on the East Coast, with average volumes of wood per acre almost doubling since the 1950s. Over 75 percent of the productive commercial forest land in the United States is privately owned.
In a study released during 2015 in Nature, a team of 38 scientists found that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, far surpassing the previously estimate of 400 billion. The researchers estimated there are 422 trees for every person on Earth.

Incidentally, the US federal government owns 28% of all US land.

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