Forests Today & Forever

Forests are resilient. It is a tribute to this inherent quality of American forests and to the success of the policies that were put in place in response to public concerns that forest conditions over much of the US have improved dramatically since 1900. The following snapshot compares the forest situation as it was in 1900 with the way it is today.

• Following two centuries of decline, the area of forest land has stabilized. Today the United States has about the same forest area as in 1920.

• The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between twenty million and fifty million acres in the early 1900s and is between two and five million acres today.

• Nationally, the average volume of standing timber per acre in US forests is about one-third greater today than in 1952; in the East, average volume per acre has almost doubled.

• Populations of whitetail deer, wild turkey, elk, pronghorn antelope, and many other wildlife species have increased substantially.

• Tree planting on all forest lands rose dramatically after World War II, reaching record levels in the 1980s. Many private forest lands are now actively managed for tree growing: seventy thousand certified tree farms encompass ninety-five million acres of privately owned land.

• The tens of millions of acres of cut over or “stumplands” that existed in 1900 have long since been reforested. Many of these areas today are mature forests. Others have been harvested a second time, and the cycle of regeneration to young forests has started again.

• Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s with each subsequent decade generally showing increasing margins of growth over harvest. By 1986 forest growth exceeded harvest by 37 percent and the volume of forest growth in that year was 350 percent greater than it had been in 1920.

Back to WoodCom
Back to Forests Today & Forever