Best View to Date of Global Forest Losses, Gains

Twelve years of global deforestation, wildfires, windstorms, insect infestations and more are captured in a new set of forest disturbance maps created from billions of pixels acquired by the imager on the NASA-USGS Landsat 7 satellite.

www.nasa.gov...



During this 12 years period of time Brazil cut its deforestation rate from 40,000 square kilometers per year to 20,000 square kilometers per year. However, deforestation continues here and has increased a lot in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Congo and Angola !

reply to post by CosmicDude

Where I live they have finally cut down the last of the old growth and have been into reforestation but using only one species of tree (black spruce) ..I think this will end up biting them in the behind down the road but that is just my opinion .The way it works here is that the Irvings lease land from the Crown and because they have such a active accounting dept. they end up getting paid to cut the forest down and paid to replant it and to finally reharvest it ..It's all good for them but the forests are gone and I dont think I will ever see them return in my life time ...sad in so many ways :>(

They call trees old when they are a hundred years old now. There used to be a lot of five hundred year old trees three hundred years ago. I suppose when you harvest them before they get big, then you can call them old at a hundred years old. Seems like man doesn't like anything that lives longer than him.

Where I live, deforestation is due to major fires during the Summer. The problem is our pine forest is being replaced by eucalyptus tree making the soil a lot more dry.

If I recall the stats the US has 38% more forest land than at the turn of the century. mainly because wood is not used to heat. Look at old pictuers compaired to ne at your local library