I wonder what the ratio of this is good samaritan tree planting versus timber industry. Timber plantings account for a large portion of US land. Timber is a very popular investment among long term land owners. Not all land is suitable for farming, and timber is a relatively passive way to extract value form the land.
Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.
> Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.
Sure, but the number of trees doesn't matter so much -- the amount of carbon sequestered by those trees is more important. Presumably, thinning out the weak trees allows the stronger trees to grow larger.
The US timber industry is actually pretty good for sequestering carbon because their economic incentives lead them to:
- Select fast-growing species of trees
- Harvest the trees before they reach their terminal state (when they stop acting as a carbon sink), then replant new trees.
- Promote the use of timber products as substitutes for carbon-intensive building materials, like concrete.
There was an interesting life-cycle analysis of this published a few years back:
Thinning out weak to let the strong grow is standard forestry practice. No one expects 100% of saplings planted to mature into fully grown trees. I am just saying, don't believe timber industry numbers on face value. The 2 or 3 trees planted for each tree harvested does not translate into a net increase of forest size. If you compare forest numbers in the USA now to 50/100 years ago, we have seen tremendous growth. However, the number has stabilized in the last few decades.
At least in the West, the vast majority of forestry land is managed by the NFS. Private land is really only used for Christmas tree farms or specialty trees for the paper industry.
For public lands, the timber industry is responsible for their own replanting, but it's largely irrelevant. More timber is lost to wildfire than logging every year, so most replanting falls on the Forest service anyway:
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reforesta...
Edit: Apparently this is all wrong and out of date!
While the NFS still owns the majority of forestry land in the West, it only accounts for a tiny portion of the overall lumber produced. From the CRO:
> Since the 1990s, FS timber production has decreased, totaling around 2 billion board feet annually since FY1999.56 In 2011, NFS supplied 2% of U.S. wood and paper products. The decline is attributable to a multitude of factors, including (but not limited to) changing legislative directives and related forest management policies and practices—such as increased planning and procedural requirements—as well as changing market dynamics for wood products, public preferences, and litigation.
Basically, it became too hard to log NFS land, so logging companies turned to private or state lands instead (and states set their own criteria for how private forestry land needs to be replanted).
I’m surrounded by thousands of acres of private land managed by foresting services.
Based on my conversations with the service (very large, multiple states, etc), most private land owners are hedge funds. They basically just hold land and lease it to the management services. No cost or risk to the hedge fund. Land values increase typically and they make revenue in the meantime. Further, many states have excessively low taxes for farm land and / or forestry so it’s really a decent investment.
No, fires happen because forests are now made solely of trees, whereas a forest normally has multiple layers, allowing it to retain moisture much better.
Of course, climate change and human stupidity are very strong factors as well.
Having a fully matured forest takes hundreds of years. Logging it on a regular basis make sure this never happens and also reduces the overall carbon sequestration. This lead to the interesting conundrum which is that even though the actual number of trees is growing, carbon sequestration is going down in forests. (Apologies, unable to find the link about the carbon sequestration decreasing for decades, if someone has it please post, I need to bookmark it.)
> More timber is lost to wildfire than logging every year
Gotta wonder how much of that is because of the way they replant? (ie: spray with round up, and then plant GMO pine, eliminating fire break species like aspen).
Not all timber is created equal. Dedicated logging tracts are a monocrop and are often yellow pine. Forested areas can also be counted as timber, but in a given tract only a certain percentage of trees are worth logging. These are generally high value trees like poplar, walnut, oak, or ash, and they are planted as generational investments.
There's a third option - unused land will grow trees over time as long as there are trees nearby. In fact that's what was the dominant reason according to the article:
> Ultimately the study found that tree cover loss in the tropics was dominated by tree cover gain in other regions, driven by AGRICULTURAL ABANDONMENT in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America
If you don't live in a dessert and you stop doing anything to your land, and there are trees in the region - your land will turn into a forest eventually. In my region (central Europe) it happens in like 15 years :)
> Timber plantings account for a large portion of US land.
Really? I can't imagine it's very big compared to agriculture, but maybe that's my midwestern bias? Do you have any figures handy (specifically for commercial timber rather than timber for other purposes e.g., hunting)?
> Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.
That sounds pretty slimy, but the headline is that there are more trees. If timber is driving it, I would think the bigger concern would be over the homogeneity of the trees and the incumbent ecosystem damage?
Lastly, I would guess (perhaps wrongly) that palm oil and banana plantations are driving the inorganic growth (I haven't yet read the article--shame on me, etc--so perhaps I'm speculating unnecessarily)
About a quarter of US land is dedicated to ‘unprotected’ timber. About ten percent of that belongs to one single business - https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/
Agriculture is a little less (about a fifth), pasture is a little more (about a third) - although that includes range land which is barely ‘land use’ at all.
Not sure where you are getting your math here. From the article: "Weyerhaeuser Co. is the largest private owner of timberlands in the U.S. With 12.4 million acres, the company controls 2.3 percent of all commercially available timber"
We have some Weyerhauser "timberland" by us - I can say they are much more like intensive agriculture than forests. I wouldn't worry about replanting on them - you better believe Weyerhauser uses every square foot of their land to grow trees on.
You are correct, I misread that as 2.3% of US (which is about 10% of 25%), rather than the correct 2.3% of timberland. So, only 2.3% of 25% - or .6% of the US.
I think the idea is that timber is a lot less labor intensive. Agriculture almost certainly produces more $ per M^2, but it takes a lot of work planting, fertilizing, and harvesting every year. Timber plantings, judging by what the above commenter wrote, probably consists of planting saplings from a tree nursery then waiting a decade or two for them to mature.
Mega fires aren't really an issue in most of the Midwest. There's large forest fires, but the fuel load isn't extremely high and there are not extended dry seasons.
Like here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (where timber is a primary landuse) there have been some big fires, but they don't compare in size or frequency to the fires out west.
I think most of it is china's great green wall. I can't say it won't work -- It is conceivable that the forestation will alter local climate to where water starts falling and sustains those trees.
I lump those into good samaritan planting. Also I am dubious on how many of those promotions just end up subsidizing replanting lumber tracts. I am trying to find numbers but anything by the timber industry just seems to tout "we are replanting more than we harvest on a national level," but doesn't seem to differentiate who is planting what.
A couple of years ago I was playing with the King County (Washington) online parcel map and found out you can get pretty decent resolution aerial photography of Seattle and its surroundings from 1936. One of the things that struck me most was that a lot of the areas that are heavily wooded now were very much less so back then, presumably because 1936 was only a few decades removed from when they clearcut all of the old growth forest. If you think about it, that means someone like my grandfather who grew up here in that era would have had a much different understanding of the idea of a forest than myself, and not in an especially good way.
I came to know about this on David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet:
While it is good to know that we have more trees than we did 35 years ago, the biodiversity of coverage has been seriously damaged. This basically means we do not have that massive variety of trees anymore. A lot of trees we grow today are mostly coming out of secondary commercial purposes. I remember a huge forest in Cambodia was cut down and repopulated with nothing but an oil plantation which isn't necessarily a great thing. The ecological imbalance caused was great enough that animal numbers decimated quickly and never returned to the original level.
It might have helped offset some CO2 levels, but again, it had other adverse effects such as requiring huge amounts of water to keep it going.
This is both surprising and unsurprising, but also potentially misses the point. If the trees lost are in the Amazon and that's a giant filter for the planet, then it doesn't really matter if we planted trees somewhere else if the environmental impact isn't directly offset. Also, it was only about 45 years ago that we had rivers catching on fire so an improvement over that doesn't mean that we've magically fixed all of our environmental issues.
Why wouldn’t it matter if we’ve planted trees elsewhere? Nobody is suggesting we’ve magically fixed every environmental issue, but wouldn’t you rather see trends like total number of trees (or number of rivers catching on fire, as you put it) trend in the right direction? I take it as a cautiously optimistic signal that people/ governments are paying attention to the problems at hand, and making progress. This is a good thing, unless you really ARE hoping for some sort of magical one off fix.
It’s not that it isn’t positive, but as another poster said astutely, a tree <> tree. Love me some trees, glad we are planting them, but that doesn’t mean that putting a rando tree in my front yard is actually having any meaningful impact over not cutting down a tree in the Amazon.
There are huge geopolitical forces fighting to preserve the Amazon. The cost of deforestation is quantified and states pay millions if not billions (I forget the numbers) to people in order to leave it untouched.
Of course, it's political and 'we're not doing enough,' etc. but individuals have more influence over the Amazon than most things.
Indeed, true restoration involves investment in forest engineering and returning to more indigenous ways of life.
I was recently on the Amazon with relevant scientists and activists. There's a lot of work to do and little financial incentive.
If you're wondering, the best thing you can do as an individual, besides getting involved in international politics, is go do an eco-tour (or otherwise support that industry), provided you don't think the benefit is offset by the plane flight.
The people doing the deforestation need alternative sources of livelihood.
> Nobody is suggesting we’ve magically fixed every environmental issue, but wouldn’t you rather see trends like total number of trees (or number of rivers catching on fire, as you put it) trend in the right direction?
Sure, but if there are 100 relevant indicators that contribute to climate change or other environmental issues, and you're actively selecting the 5 indicators that seems positive and reporting on those regardless of the overall trends, that's not great (I'd argue that would be deliberately dishonest).
But sure, if you're just randomly curious about the trend in tree population and you look it up and it looks positive, then sure, I suppose you could be pleased.
This is a near-meaningless statistic for evaluating the health of the environment, obviously. Maximizing the coverage of intact ecologies supporting biodiversity should be the management objective. The problem here is that you can plant more trees, but the forest is monocropped and doesn't support the rich network of species it did previously. Hence, the importance of conservation (and corridors between protected lands) rather than restoration.
Yes but. Forget about simple linear relations. Where are those trees? What is their biogeochemical role? How change in them and the surfaces they occupy interacts with global dynamics in Earth system components? These are some of the questions that matter.
I fully agree with you, but perhaps for the opposite reason. For me the little detail is each tree, and the broad trend is what emerges from a large amount of trees and what they mean at Earth scale.
"Sadly, the research also confirms a large-scale loss of our planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems, particularly in the tropical rainforests."
Single species trees planted for paper is not the same as native trees and ecosystems that existed for 1000s years and that we keep destroying for some IKEA furniture
Fun data point from Kentucky. When Daniel Boone discovered the cumberland gap and made way for settlers to settle in Kentucky, kentucky was ~80% forest land, and most of that was because native americans burned sections of kentucky for crops and living space.
~~100 years ago, kentucky had below 50% forest coverage, today it's over 90%, more than it's ever been in recorded history.~~
These numbers came from a speech the head of ketucky's forestry service gave to my college polsci class, they disagree with what google says is the truth. These numbers may be false.
I'm seeing that on google too. My numbers came from a speech the head of kentucky's forestry service gave to my college political science class. He may have been wrong, I'm gonna edit my post if I still can to make it clear my numbers might be wrong.
From memory, most of the population of the UK resides in just 2% of the land.
I couldn't find the stat (I heard it on the radio) but there's this[1]:
> 91% of Scotland’s population live in 2% of its land area
Scotland does have large areas of barely lived on land but it's still surprising to see this stat, so I wouldn't think Kentucky's stat, even though I've never been there.
It's not just the tree count but type too that needs thinking about. Trees to help biodiversity rather than just for the numbers. Having huge masses of fast growing pine is not the best for wildlife. Variety is the key.
Trees are overhyped when it comes to CO2 capture/recycling. Algae already outproduces trees globally by 2x. It is also much easier to industrialize. For example, algae ponds could be built alongside fossil fuel plants to capture carbon on site.
Oil is predominately captured algae that died, sank to the bottom of the ocean, and was sealed in by salt deposits/other nonpermeable layers. Coal is carbon captured by trees, but it only formed in a relatively narrow period after cellulose evolved but before bacteria/fungus evolved to eat it. Oil will continue to form, but it's unlikely any new coal will form in the future.
In theory younger trees should consume more CO2 as they are still growing. Older trees that are maintaining a steady state should consume a net of almost 0 CO2.
But the 100 year old tree that was removed (and everything growing on it and in the soil near it) added a lot of CO2 to the air, and it's unlikely that was grows back now will be as rich in biodiversity and CO2 binding capacity than the old one.
Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon is in the 100 year old tree and when it's cut down and turned into something it's still there. So that carbon is sitting the walls of a house, furniture, or sheafs of paper, isn't it?
Disregarding cutting the tree down to just burn it for heat, obviously.
> Older trees that are maintaining a steady state should consume a net of almost 0 CO2.
They are a storage of CO2. If we replaced all old trees with new ones we will gain a lot of potential for CO2 capture but at the cost of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere.
You are right. But I think that the point was to notice that we may have lost many good trees even if we are trying to add new ones.
The CO2 is only released if we burn them. If we use the wood for building materials or other goods with long-term storage, the carbon continues to be locked up.
I would expect plants to genetically encode growth limits, because a mature tree that continues to stand and produce seed will reproduce more than one that falls over prematurely because it never stopped growing.
Canopy coverage is a fine measure. It's equating the number of trees with canopy cover with carbon sequestration which is at issue. The original study isn't what I'm commenting on.
eg, Younger forests are not as productive as older forests when it comes to carbon sequestration.
How would you measure this with accuracy and cost efficiency?
Is canopy reasonable enough after a certain percent increase (say, 5% increase)? We are talking about percentages of the Earth's dry land, so nontrivial certainly.
> How would you measure this with accuracy and cost efficiency?
Does not seem like an impossible task, I see two preliminary ways at least to attack the problem, but probably both will be wrong and is not my job to measure this without resources in any case
> not my job to measure this without resources in any case
Ah, I misunderstood. I thought perhaps you had some insight here based on your insistence that canopy is a bad metric.
So canopy is definitely measurable at low-ish cost via satellite monitoring. I would presume it wouldn't be hard to add reasonable time-series based assumptions on new growth and make calibration adjustments that take into account the evolution.
Going into a forest and sampling, everywhere, is going to be cost inefficient relative to a model that can be based on canopy and calibrated on sub-samples of forest sampling, both historical and recent expeditions.
At least, that's how folks who would do this kind of job would likely approach it, based on my experience in similar domains. When it comes to funding, academia is a brutal place where resources are slim. Obvious adjustments are the next-best low hanging fruit to original development -- so a direct canopy measure would next likely be iterated to account for new-ness of forest and carbon sequestration calibration.
Someone advocating direct air carbon capture made this strong argument that stuck with me: Carbon released by drilling oil didn't come from trees. So recapturing the carbon from what we think was released from trees burned down before does not include carbon stored underground.
Do more trees equal more forrest fires? What, if anything, can be done to prevent mass fires down the road as we plant more trees? Should we be promoting controlled burns or thinning out of forests?
Don't plant eucalyptus trees. California is full of eucalyptus imported from Australia. They are oil soaked trees that drop a large amount of debris, both in the form of twiggy branches and the bark the peals off. This is great fire fuel and is in part the reason behind California's wild fires. Obviously they aren't the sole reason, but selecting proper trees can go a long way in managing fire risk.
I think it's vital to start shifting the default narrative around this type of thing to match current historical understanding.
The Amazon rainforest is a _garden_.
North America was deforested by humans thousands of years ago, and many trees were planted by people.
"Biodiversity" is an imprecise term in a way that muddles the broader relevance. We're losing previously _managed_ forest (high biodiversity in a way that's relevant to humans) and gaining "wild" land, which often enough is not as beneficial, even as merely a carbon sink.
The real story is that we've lost the ability to cultivate the land in a way that serves our interests, plus there are almost 8 billion people around now.
Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.