Posted on 01/12/2012 5:21:20 PM PST by blam
This Map Shows Where All The Trees Are In The US
Dina Spector
Jan. 12, 2012, 2:48 PM
NASA's Earth Observatory just released a map illustrating where all the trees are in America.
The map was created over six years by Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey.
The dark swaths of green represent parts of the country with the greatest concentration of biomass.
You can see dense tree cover in the Pacific Northwest as well New England, which has been reforested after intensive logging in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Very interesting. I’m fortunate to live in one of the darker ‘green’ areas. I love my trees and mountains!
Would love to see what that map would have looked like 300 years ago.
I think half of them are in my backyard...
Serious! I got a couple 130 foot Doug firs back there and some pretty good sized cedars.
And I live riiight there!
And that’s just trees. Lots of other densely vegetated environments that aren’t shown there.
I’ve heard that, too.
This map is very interesting, in terms of where they are (such as punctuating ferquently the great empty spaces of Nevada and Utah) and where they aren’t (such as a the inland “MIssissippi Delta” and a strange slash from Virginia (the Shenendoah Valley?) across Pennsylvania, and up the Eastern edge of New York).
I got about 60 Doug Firs and some Hemlock. Average about 80 ft.
I cannot believe all those people in the middle of the country cut all their trees down!! Simply unbelievable they would cut them down for firewood or too build wood houses! What were they thinking. Now it is just flat, grass covered plains. Oh, wait, that is the way God made it. My bad.
I got about 60 Doug Firs and some Hemlock. Average about 80 ft.
I think the lack of green on this map is supposed to make us into tree huggers.
I was curious and for a couple of summers did the same thing, I checked out old photos in the library, copied them, found the same location, and almost invariably there were far more trees today.
There are several reasons for this. The railroads were a great cause of deforestation, and there were alarmist proclimations around 1900 that we were running out of trees. This led to railroads finding substitues, and eventually the automobile and diesel rail engines halted the railroad's over use.
Also, we stopped using wood for cooking and heat, and got connected to the electrical grid. And finally, we have allowed some lands that were in agriculture to go back to forests.
I live in Texas green biomass. Recently had 10 inches of rain - glory!
It’d be interesting to see the state lines overlaid on this map. We drove east on Interstate 70 from Denver through the Midwest and there wasn’t a tree around until just before Topeka Kansas, and suddenly, everything turned green. It was really amazing. Makes me think that the lower center green line is probably where that is.
Very interesting map.
It was interesting to me...my wife and I went to San Diego for a week a couple of years ago, neither one of us had ever been there, and we loved the climate, very comfortable, not too hot (late spring) but apparently there had been a drought for a while, and everything was brown, brown, brown.
We took a red-eye home, landing back in Boston around 6 am, and had a taxi take us the thirty miles home to the west.
The contrast was stunning to me. As we drove down this rural New England road on a sunny Sunday morning, the sun was streaming through the lush green trees in crepuscular rays, with just a hint of mist rising through them. We saw a deer on the side of the road...
We just take it all for granted, like people who live near the ocean and simply stop seeing it and hearing it. But after a week in a very arid Southern California, it was breathtaking to come home.
The politics up here are absolute crap, but it sure can be beautiful country.
I once read that large areas of Alabama were open plains when the White man first arrived. This was not natural but due to Indians keeping it cleared for agriculture.
And I read on here a while ago that due to the logging prevention folks, our forests were now so continous along the northern part of the US that the barred owls are now taking over the areas formerly inhabited by the poor little spotted owl. In some cases, maybe even EATING them.
It ain’t nice to mess with nature..But can be funny sometimes.
Michigan has been logged over about 3 times but you wouldn’t know it today.
I would not doubt it
My homestate...much like where you reside is covered in them
cept the Delta..but even it has some dense forests and forested swamps
Everything around here is second or even third growth, but there is a nearby lake that has a couple true monsters next to it. You have to take a boat or a raft to get back to where they are.
Not that tall, maybe 120 feet or so, but a good six feet at the base.
They’re at the bottom of a hill that runs up from the lake and I think the guys who originally logged thought to hell with them, that’s WAY too much work!
Basically, Uncle Sam bought land and/or took it and planted trees, ie FDR.
1900's etc. private enterprise did a poor job of 'preservation' and we have learned from such mistakes.
Also, various disease[Chestnut blight] wiped out many of our old growth, and other faster growing trees took their place.
I live in the middle of a Pecan orchard, none this year due to the drought (texas), so many trees here, I guess thats why Ferdinand Lindheimer (Texas botanist) moved here when Comanches were still roaming these parts. When I feel old I walk around the corner and theres a 175 year old Live Oak (I think it’s a live Oak), second oldest in Texas, Oldest being in El Paso and theres always the 5 foot thick cypress on the Guadalupe/Comal River. Welcome to the Texas Hill Country.
Though it’s gonna be in the 20’s tonight the locally supplied anti-freeze (Dripping Springs Vodka) is excellent.
Maine wins!!
Yup...73% forested and that is increasing by 1 million acres yearly.
The number one export is timber products...and, that equals a GDP the same as Iran with five times less people.
We have more trees in New York than you have in Alabama. Ha ha! ;-)
Boy howdy. I can see my little pond.(ahem)
>> “MIssissippi Delta” and a strange slash from Virginia (the Shenendoah Valley?) <<
Good observation about a couple of famous agricultural areas!
Also striking is the crescent sweeping from mid-Alabama up thru northeastern Mississippi, all the way to the Tennessee line. It’s an old cotton-producing area that was a stronghold of the slave-holding plantation aristocracy before the Civil War.
This latter region is often called the “Black Belt” in Alabama (mainly for its rich soil, but also for its black-majority population) and the “Prairie” in northeastern Mississippi. Fascinating how such land-using and demographic patterns have been maintained over nearly 200 years!
Probably something like this:
My house isn’t there.. I have 6 trees on my lot and woods next door..I love trees, they are one of my passions
which explains post 26
I drove up the trace from Tupelo north to the Leipers Fork TN exit which is near my property
and deer everywhere for 150 miles
several scorable bucks....
btw...slight snow here...kids out...they are happy
I drive by this nearly every day, and one bitter cold, windy February morning, it just struck me as I drove by, so I stopped. It was cold enough that morning with the wind to make my eyes water uncontrollably.
Interesting thing is, there are all these trees and vegetation around there, but an illustration of the area done back around that time (I saw it in a museum here) shows no trees as far as you can see in any direction! It kind of blows your mind to stand there and imagine that...
I’ve been in that general neck of the woods many times. Used to go steelheading out near Forks, and there are still remnants of the original logging.
Seeing a length of a tree ten or twelve feet in diameter laying on the ground...
I drove up from somewhere on the west side of Hood Canal into the Olympic National Forest. As soon as you cross the border, the trees double and sometimes almost triple in size. Mostly cedar.
my woods are lovely, dark and deep...
Correct-a-mundo!!!!!
That forested area betwixt the Appalachia's and the Mississippi River had a large agrarian population that had burned back most of the forest there. Disease, in advance of any pioneering, collapsed this society.
By the time settlers came they saw a mature forest. The plains native-americans ritually burned back the forest where the plains and the forest met for several reasons including simply keeping the forest at bay. Insect control and fertilization of the prairie for better grazing grass and also for a clear line of view against enemy encroachment.
That’s a magnificent tree!
That is true.
Nice!
Would have been awesome to have lived back then.(well, probably not lol). Perhaps spending a week there in a time machine would suffice. I’ll be sure to take my laptop and post my experiences on FR.
Wow! I had no idea those things lived that long!
About twenty miles from my house was a 300 year old Maple tree called the Crocker Maple, and I believe it fell in an ice storm last year.
When I saw that tree a few years back, I admit there was something awesome about standing there looking at it, just imagining everything that tree had presided over.
I can't imagine all the different hurricanes and storms it has faced over the years.
Actually, most of the non-green areas in the map would have been the same 500 or 1000 years ago: prairie, desert, and mountain tundra.
I’m with you on that, cripplecreek. Liberals think we have to baby nature, but the truth is, it is a lot more powerful than we are.
Doesn’t mean we have to intentionally mistreat it, but it is one of the reason the whole global warming scam just infuriates me.
People would be amazed at how fast nature would cover up what we have done after we are gone. Just human conceit...
Hahaha! That VPN tunnel back to the future will be a trick to set up!
I know I can do it! I've been working hard on getting the endpoints to talk over the distance in time. I'm sure I'll have to do away with the SHA/AES256 encryption to keep things as simple as possible for the link.
I’m a true conservationist in the truest sense of the word but I don’t see anything wrong with driving dangerous animals away from population centers.
I grew up wandering the southern Michigan woods with no fear of running into anything more dangerous than a raccoon. Today we have confirmed black bears, unconfirmed mountain lions, and we’re overrun with coyotes.
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