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 ...
Pecans worldwide have their origins in Texas and Northern Mexico.
I just completed chopping down one of my 100 year old pecan trees because lightning struck it. A local guy cut it up and hauled it away to sell as fire wood. Or, maybe to a restaurant for BBQ wood.
There are pecan trees there in Texas (on the Blanco River) that must be 20 feet in diameter. I could park my car behind them and you couldn't see the car.
PS...I retired from TI, Houston.
I hiked some in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Hurricane Ridge has some of the most breathtaking scenery I have ever seen.
This makes me glad I live in MA.,which is usually not the case.
Nice chart.
We have the world collegiate football champions for three consecutive years, ha, ha.
* 2009 Alabama
* 2010 Auburn
* 2011 Alabama
Eat your heart out.
BTW, the Alabama football program realized a profit of $45 million (after expenses) this year. Trees are not the only green.......
That seems to me like a pretty trustworthy source.
Ah, Rockport. One of my favorite getaways. Come on, retirement ... I'm ready to make it a permanent home.
Kid Rock filmed this video here in Michigan and showcased the Michigan we usually keep to ourselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbbrtaNiQMs&feature=player_embedded
Its a great pro American tune as well.
Just one?
I had three wandering around my back yard a few weeks ago.
A good part of that “strange slash” in PA is valley farmland.
I’ve seen pics of my town here in MA back in the OLD days and it was completely stripped. It’s amazing to see the difference between now and then.
“I had three wandering around my back yard a few weeks ago.”
We’ve got a semi-tame herd of 15 or so that pretty much have the run of our little town — our big topic of conversation this time of year is how to keep ‘em out of our gardens, without hurting their little feelings... ;)
OMG...you DO have it thought out!
I’m with you. I don’t know about there, but they have laws in this state about trapping (specifically beavers) and then the same dingbats who put all the laws in place whine about the flooding.
Liberalism is a mental illness.
Great map. You can see where Tornado alley rips up saplings before they ever can cast a shadow, and you can see where the TX hill country is the greenest spot in TX after the Piney Woods.
I can’t live without trees over me, under, beside, in front of. The prairie drive to Houston or Dallas depresses me.
ROLL TIDE!
See that dark patch at the top left of our country.... those are my trees.
I’ve been pushing for a long time for our WA license plates to read : “Chop Wood or Die”.
I stayed in Frisco for a few months back in the 80s and hated the lack of trees. I spent a week in Longview on my way back north and liked it there though.
Kudzu doesn't count.
but the truth is, it is a lot more powerful than we are.
Exactly.
And there is a good example of that on the map itself.
If you look closely, you will see two very dense green strips running north-south on the west coast.
On the inside strip, if you look up towards the State of Washington, you will see two white dots of sorts.
The top dot is pretty close to me, about 30 miles. It is Mt. Rainier.
The dot below that (remember, these white areas are places with no trees), is almost exactly 100 miles due south of my house. Took me a bit to realize what it was.
There is a large area there bigger than Mt. Rainier National Park with no trees.
There are no trees there because Mt. St. Helens woke up with a bad hair day!!
Yes it does:
Try a run through the TX Hill Country, if you can. It’s the most amazing example of hydroponics ever. We have no soil - NONE - except for the humus composed of dropped leaves of Cedar, Oak and Elm, and lesser native shrubs.
Our soil is limestone (called caliche once you grade it) and
somehow enables thickets that cease to exist once you get to ‘real’ soil out of the hills.
bump
Wow! Stunning. “Bad Hair Day”, indeed!
Yes, the ‘organic and natural’ crowd assumed that Native Americans, being the indigenous peoples who only could live in total mystical harmony with the earth. The truth is far less mystical. When, for example, they set the forest alight to aid in harvesting game, they didn’t have the means from stopping the forest fire from consuming many square miles of trees.
Today in much of the US, the old Forest Service fire towers are no longer needed because enough people live where nobody used to and fires get reported promptly. And so, in my neck of the woods, the big forest management issue is that cedar trees are taking over where oak and hickory used to prevail. This because we now choose to suppress fires instead of allowing the forest floor to be burned every few years. I can hardly wait until the enviros want to “re-introduce” fire on the heals of their “re-introduced” wolves.
My grandfather ran a pack train up to hurricane ridge. They built a resort up out of Port Angeles. Heart o the Hills. What pictures I’ve seen of Hurricane Ridge it is beautiful country.
Wiped out 1000 square miles of forest!
If you use Google maps and zoom in on it, it’s pretty stark.
But the animal life, fish, and vegetation are coming back gangbusters.
When did all the state boundaries change? I’ve been in a lot of meetings this week...did I miss something important?
Can we herd all the libs into those big empty white treeless states in the middle? Or is that where they are building the concentration camps for us?
Good. If you can't get rid of it then make use of it.
It is obvious you’re not a Californian. That isn’t brown! What you saw was “golden.”
I’ve been in California almost 40 years and I still haven’t adjusted to everything being “golden” from May to October and then greening up in the winter. My wife (a native California) suffers the reverse problem when we travel east.
Hehe, true enough...:)
Golden!
” - - - 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.”
That’s what happens when the Wolves are exterminated.
BTW, Wolves are the ancestor of Man’s best friend, the dog. AAHHHRRHHhhhhhOOO000LLLLL000oooooooooooooooooooo - - - - - - - - - - -
Wow.
So, there are few trees, if any, in the Plains or deserts? Is anyone surprised by that? Golly, I wonder why they were called Plains and deserts...
Well, if you don't count the mesquites that the Spaniards gave Texas. The Spaniards brought over mesquite beans to feed their horses while on their walk about.
That dark green on the West Coast is Sugar Pine country.
To #12: The boat is on its’ way.
After spending some time in the Southwest years ago, I was always king of amazed of how brown every thing was. When back home in Western PA, a met a couple who were from Tucson and they were amazed by how green every thing was.
I guess it boils down to what you are used to.
Your town looks beautiful. My place on the Rockies has about an average (rough surface from winds) foot-thick crust of snow-ice that will probably be here until summer (and probably deeper at times). Wind gusts over 100 mph and temps below 0 last night. No trees here and not many for miles.
And it's true. Every year, Weyerhauser, Georgia-Pacific and the rest plant thousands more trees than they cut.
Moreover, since the first global survey (Surveyor, 1968), the global acreage of forest has increased every single year.
Must be all that CO2...
I had a mesquite stump with a shoot coming out bearing a 2” thorn that slashed my off-road Michelin like a latex balloon.
As I understand, the Juniper Ash (cedar tree) is also a gift from Spain.
I used to view it as something to be uprooted, burned, chipped until I considered its dewing function.
A hundred years ago, New Hampshire was burning so much discarded slash in the most distant part of the state that buggy-drivers in Boston couldn't see ahead. The committee that founded the NH Forest Protection Association started in Boston!
"...New England, which has been reforested after intensive logging in the 18th and 19th centuries..."
About 15 years ago, New Hampshire tourism once advertised on the Internet that it was a state "97% trees and 3% 'under water'".
The Joshua Tree of the Southwest is very long-lived—like thousands of years; fortunately, it is not a valuable tree for the market.
"If you want to be happy for a year, plant a garden.
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a tree".
Much second- and third-growth is of less-marketable trees. When I stepped out of a lumber store with White Pine under one arm to finsh a 50-year-old house project, I realized I'd just spent $90 for three boards.
White Pine is a valuable tree where its dropped needles will stop erosion. They are being clearcut by the thousands every year. We have flooding problems in some villages now.
In central New Hampshire, the original White Pine has been replaced by the near-worthless Eastern Hemlock, which crowds out everything else through its deep shade. The decreasing numbers of mature Red Pine and Cedar are almost tourist attractions.
I wanted very much to buy an antique hutch made from Chestnut, only because the tree disappeared from the forests. The buyer of my central Florida home dropped an ancient lakeside Bald Cypress, because he didn't know that those trees drop all their leaves every winter—and thought it was dead. :-/
Its been an extraordinarily warm winter so far but have no fear, its 19 degrees this morning and winter has arrived about a month late.
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