NASA recently released imagery showing the deforestation of America …in just 34 years.
We are killing the Earth
Forever reblog.
Oh wow
Damn dawgthis makes me want to cry
i dont normally reblog this kinna stuff but…c’mon
Bullshit.
Forest cover in the US has been holding steady since the 1970s, and actually has been on the increase in some regions.
What you’re seeing here, assuming that this is not in fact a manipulated image, is probably a seasonal difference. You’ll note the extensive green across the Great Plains, which has NEVER been heavily forested—it being plains and all.
North America was catastrophically deforested in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the vast majority of the continent’s virgin forests were stripped for logging. Since then, however, much North American forest cover has been re-established. North America DOES face problems relating to forest ecology, but it’s not about the number of trees:
1: Many tree species face dangerous incursions by invasive species. American elm (Dutch elm disease and elm yellows), American chestnut (chestnut blight), eastern hemlock (wooly adelgid, an insect), and all ash species (emerald ash borer, another insect) are now under threat. In the case of the American chestnut, the only thing standing between it and total extinction is conservation biologists and some heavy-duty genetics work.
2: While the forest cover is pretty good, increasing fragmentation of forest lands due to road-building and settlement impacts the ability of animal populations to migrate and interbreed—especially larger animal species which need more territory in order to function.
3: A big challenge is the preservation and re-establishment of old-growth forests. This is the primary reason conservationists are so protective of public forest land. These are forests where the habitat has been undisturbed long enough to establish a diverse blend of tree and plant species, ages, and a distinct array of heights (ground cover, understory, and canopy—the highest trees). It can take a couple hundred years for forest to reach old-growth stage, which supports the widest and healthiest diversity in plant and animal species. Hence, we have plenty of trees, but not so much old-growth forest (though we’ve got more than a lot of places). The vast majority of North American old-growth forest now exists on protected public lands (you know, the ones various companies keep wanting access to in order to harvest, mine, etc.).
The areas of the globe where deforestation itself is a major threat are mostly the tropical forests—the Amazon, central Africa, and southeast Asia—which suffer widespread losses of habitat every year due to clear-cutting for the use of farming and ranching.
There’s a cool new tool available on this subject as of February: http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest
It’s a granular compilation of the world’s forestation/deforestation changes since the year 2000. Built on the Google Earth Engine (with Google’s assistance; their servers did the data crunching for this project, which was MASSIVE), you can zoom in and out and check out changes in specified areas, during specified time frames. The researchers who assembled this plan to update it annually with new satellite data.